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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/26575888">Love and Other Wasteland Horrors</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lowlifes_Back/pseuds/The_Lowlifes_Back'>The_Lowlifes_Back</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>A Series of Doves and Serpants [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Established Relationship, F/M, H.P. Lovercraft Tribute, Heavy Angst, Horror, Psychological Horror, Romance, commitment issues, cosmic horror</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-06 11:34:29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Mature</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>37,861</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/26575888</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Lowlifes_Back/pseuds/The_Lowlifes_Back</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>The fear of the unknown is a common fear. In this tale of terror, feast your eyes upon the parallels drawn between the unknowns of a new relationship between best friends and the cosmic unknown which is truly unknowable in every sense of the word.</p><p>After a heated argument in their kitchen that challenges everything they’ve come to understand between them, The Lone Wanderer reads a letter from a nameless stranger.</p><p>“I bid you to come to Mt. St. Helens...”</p><p>Now tasked with a job to save St. Helens. the struggling couple will have to come to terms with themselves and the tensions between them. Finding common ground on a long and arduous journey, Butch will soon realize, that being comfortable in a monogamous relationship, is not nearly as scary as what they have ahead of them. </p><p>Whatever lies beneath St. Helens, is surely enough to prove that to them both.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Butch DeLoria/Female Lone Wanderer, Butch DeLoria/Lone Wanderer</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series:</b></td><td>A Series of Doves and Serpants [3]</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Series URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/series/1932970</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>4</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Hello, everyone! This is my first ever attempt at writing horror and I hope that it ends up being as chilling as it is sweet. I wanted to really drawn attention to “the fear of the unknown” in a very small scale vs a much BIGGER scale.</p><p>Same fear, different circumstances.</p><p>If there is one thing H.P. Lovecraft was known for (besides being hella racist) it was fear of the cosmic unknown. Things beyond human comprehension. One would argue love can be like that at times.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <b>Love and Other Wasteland Horrors</b>
</p><p>It was a quiet and cool late afternoon, in the month of October and the Lone Wanderer sat alone in the living room of the home she shared with Butch Deloria. Dogmeat chewing on some poor deceased raider’s femur and her with her sack of old letters, which she had yet to actually answer, until this last month. She was now at the final one, because it hadn’t taken them very long to finish with all of the requests in the sack at all. Since Butch had finished the motorcycle, it had become their main form of transportation and there were new parts being shipped to him every other day, with people looking to buy from him. The man was washing the dishes in front of her, barefoot in his oldest t-shirt and a pair of scavenged sweats.</p><p>They’d just finished up with dinner and the starry night was approaching from outside their window. Evangeline had fallen in love with that bike around the first week of riding on the back of it. Turns out that you can get a lot more done, when you cut out the walking time it took to get from one settlement to the other. So many more lives, both taken and saved collectively. So, because it was faster to get to places, The Lone Wanderer had expanded her reach to areas far, far away from the D.C. ruins.</p><p>Things have been restless between them lately however. With new success and new change, Butch had begun to become oddly distant. The affection they held for each other was still there, but there was something wrong. She didn’t know what was going through his mind most of the time, but there was a lot more going on than she was comfortable with. She doesn’t like feeling as if she’d done something wrong, when as far as she could tell, she’d been nothing but good to him these last few months.</p><p>Butch speaks up from the kitchen, making idle conversation. “Yo Bookworm, what’s the story over there?” He glances over his shoulder and she looks up from the couch. She’d been going through heavy correspondence like they were light pamphlets. With the bike, she’d been finishing jobs faster and faster, and now she’d come across the final letter in the bag. The last unopened envelope sat in her fingers, ready to be read. </p><p>She shrugs at him while observing the oddly unique, browned and off white envelope. It had arrived via her mail box while she’d been out on a job with Butch. That was at least 2 months ago. She answers him absentmindedly, unsure of it herself. “I don’t know yet. Haven’t opened it.” On the coffee table in front of her, sits Butch’s Switchblade, which she’d taken to using as her letter opener, much to Butch’s many protests.</p><p>He’d cooked a lot and started on dinner earlier in the afternoon, so their sink was filled with a number of pots, pans, and a roasting dish, which had held a stack of Yao-Guai ribs in it. She’d offered to help him, but for some odd reason, he was feeling generous that night and told her to sit down. So, with the window wide open, the sound of running water, Dogmeat’s happy gnawing, and her last task in hand, she felt strangely on edge. It was an abnormal feeling, which she couldn’t quite understand. Everything was peaceful, without any reason to be antsy.</p><p>So then why did Butch still feel far away?</p><p>She’s snatching the letter opener, Butch’s Toothpick, up off the coffee table. Bringing the blade to the cracked and crinkled envelope’s seal, she takes a pause. There is a very old looking wax seal on the parchment. Butch’s voice sticks her ears with a note of poorly timed impatience. “Well, hurry up. Not like I have all night. I have shit to do in the morning.” She clicks her teeth at him, annoyed.</p><p>Since about a month or two ago, he’d gotten it into his head, that he could do no wrong. His attitude had changed and he would smile at her, but it was as if he would catch himself and force a scowl. He’d gotten flakier and had wanted to do more jobs alone. Sometimes he looked as if he wanted to kiss her, but would promptly excuse himself. He was starting to revert back to a more prideful part of himself.</p><p>All the fame and the jobs, had started getting to his head and she was not happy about it. He was beginning to resemble the arrogant bully, which she’d had to put up with in the vault as a child. Worst part was, he’d deny it every time she brought it up. He had started leaving the house at night a lot more too. For what reason she didn’t know, but their relationship had been strained lately over some unseen issue he’d taken up all by himself.</p><p>It was the first time they’d had a problem between them since…well since they had brought kissing onto the table. That being said, she bit her tongue. She glared at his back, trying to be civil and had been patient with him, thinking that he would open up to her soon. He was still her best friend, all their differences aside. This change in him had begun to make her feel exceedingly lonely though.</p><p>She looks back at the envelope and the odd, 2 headed bird, which has been stamped into the viscose wax seal. With a heavy heart, she mumbles tiredly at the man. “Nobody asked you to stay up with me, Deloria.” The only indicator that he heard her, is the sound of him dropping a pan clumsily without a word. She takes his old blade and breaks the seal. The unease in their home is growing in the silence, as Butch shuts off the faucet.</p><p>He’s bringing up a fight, for no reason, just to get a rise out of her. “-All you’ve been doing is drag me down lately and it’s getting real old, real fast.” Then from outside the window, a tendril of biting cold reaches inside their quiet home. It reaches past him and right for her, the wind leaving her chilled beneath her ratty  t-shirt and shorts. The night is upon them and the way he’s standing, ridged and bent over the counter, is a sign of unrest. He’s griping the edge of the sink, refusing to look at her.</p><p>The broken seal crumbles away in her lap and she raises her voice at him, not bothering to stand up. “Drag you down?! I have done nothing but encourage you, Butch!” The lines of his handsome face have been etched with an arrogant smile or a sneering leer in the far off past. That ugly smile has returned with vengeance in the last month. The rude remarks and the lack of respect, has started to put a pause on their relationship, in a way that feels sudden and strange. He’s turned to face her with a glare, full of that childish pride, which she had thought that he’d grown out of.</p><p>He argues back. “Well, maybe I’m just sick of living in your dumb, blonde shadow! How about that?!”</p><p>A flash of insecurity flickers across his features, which tries to soften her heart toward him. He’d gotten much softer and kinder to her after all the time they’d spent together up here. This wasn’t like him or rather, this was who he had used to be. She crosses her arms and fights a shiver, as another gust of wind, violently blows their kitchen curtains inward. The cold and the fear of this new, yet familiar kind of cruelty out of him, leaves her voice shaky. “Butch…”</p><p>He can’t explain it himself, but there’s a wicked part of his heart, rearing its ugly head. It’s a dark shadow on their relationship. A fear he can’t abide by, which has started to warp his thoughts toward her. He’d die for her in a heartbeat and he didn’t want to be without her, but that wasn’t what this was about. It was about not knowing who he was anymore; with all the success he’d had thrust upon him, he wasn’t sure he even knew who he was anymore.</p><p>His thoughts are on the fact that people still look to her first. He was still overshadowed by her, after all this time. He’s still just a hairdresser and she’s still the vault’s future doctor and now that he’s been with her this long? Losing her has been on his mind a lot more lately and death wasn’t the only way she could get taken from him. She’s going to wake up one day, realize that he’s really not a good person.</p><p>And now that he has the legs to stand on his own?</p><p>She’ll kick him out. She’ll finally see what he sees. That he’s selfish and would sell his soul, if it meant keeping himself and her alive. She’ll get tired of this life with him and he knows it.</p><p>Butch’s eyes flicker below her collarbone and then back to her gentle face. His heart pounds and he can’t stand her at the moment. His expression hardens and he’s hitting her where he knows it’ll hurt the most. “-I don’t think I can do this anymore.” That statement is everything she’s ever been afraid of. It’s a low blow and he knows it. </p><p>He watches her expression of shock and crosses his arms, already regretting saying it. That’s not how he really feels, but the words are flowing free now. “In fact, I’m thinking I need my own place!” She’s dropping the letter, leaving it forgotten on the coffee table. She searches his eyes and her voice, twists into something ugly. “Is that supposed to scare me?!” She scoffs, gesturing to the home that they’d built together, anger building up in her chest. “My house isn’t good enough for you anymore?” </p><p>She runs her hands through her hair, blindsided by him, now trying to piece together sentences now. “What the hell does that even mean, Deloria?” He’s stomping up to her and she’s staring him down, too angry to even think straight. Meanwhile, Butch is running a hand through his own hair, mirroring her body language without noticing and not really thinking about what he’s saying anymore. “You never let me get farther than first fucking base, so I think it means, what it means, Blackwell!”  </p><p>He just really wants to hurt her. Bring her down a peg. It’s this ugly little voice that he thought he’d already dealt with a long time ago, escaping his mouth like he’s spitting daggers. “You’re just a real pain to look at alright! I can’t get any peace with you just… BREATHING THERE!” The realization that he cares more about sex than she’d expected out of him, leaves her feeling humiliated. He’s standing there, huffing like an animal on a rampage and she’s speechless for the first time in a very long time.</p><p>She’s livid enough to squawk at him, the first thought that comes to mind being. “-You bastard!” She’s shaking her head, stuttering. “Me? I’m a pain? I’M THE PAIN?!” She’s scoffing at him, because he’s being more than a little ridiculous. “Who do you think are?! You’re not entitled to me!” Sex? That’s what this is about?</p><p>His chest’s puffed out and his face is turning red, for more than one reason or another. The churning outrage inside him, produces a sneer and acidic words, drip off his tongue. “Entitled? Me? Nah, I’m not like you! Never have been, never will be! Nothing but Butch here, baby!” He points at her and then out towards the window, looking for the pain her eyes, trying to produce it blindly. “But you? You still act like the world revolves around YOU!” There it is, the way her bottom lip trembles and her eyes narrow, he’s crossing a line he shouldn’t be, his voice low and bruising. “…You know that feeling? Like you’re trapped in somebody else’s story?” He leans down into her face, trying to intimidate her, growling the words low and hard. “…even though he’s dead. You’re still stuck there right?” </p><p>All his proximity does is leave her unwilling to back down and even when he delivers the final blow, she refuses to back away. “You’re still, Daddy’s Little Doctor… and everyone still kisses your ass out here, just like in the vault. But you never feel like you deserve the praise. Am I supposed to feel sorry for you? <b>Too bad I don’t.</b>” It was then she realized, that he just wanted to hurt her. That’s all he wanted to do and she couldn’t stand to be near him. She couldn’t stand his face or his bullshit. This was a temper tantrum and he was child. </p><p>It hurt even more, when she thinks about how good it would feel to have his mouth against her own.</p><p>She could NOT stand him.</p><p>Or the way he chewed Brahmin jerky. Especially the way he had to organize everything <em> his </em>way, she couldn’t stand that either. Her fists are bawled up at her sides and he’s looking at her like he wants to either kill her or kiss her. The tension is hot enough to distract them from the inky black night and the winter winds blowing into their shared space. Her eyes start to water, because he’s got no right to talk about her father’s ghost.</p><p>Accusing her of having it easy? What about her life had been easy? When had she ever complained? Other than to him… what did he want? She’d trusted him with everything. He was pushing her away and she’d been noticing it for months.</p><p>The worst thing about loving someone or even just knowing someone for so long, is that they knew how to hit you, right in your weakest pieces. Her voice is a raw whisper and the tears are trying to flood out of her, but she’ll be damned if she lets him have her tears. “Get out.” The words are cold. When they dawn on him they suck the wind right out of Butch’s sails for a moment. He’s used to being kicked out of bars and out of towns, but it’s been a long time since she kicked him out of the house. He looks away towards the door, then back down at her, confirming her words, with a tremor in his voice. “Didn’t hear you. What was that?”</p><p>He licks his lips, feeling the adrenaline pour of him. He’s shaking and beginning to regret his words. Bringing up her dad was a mistake. He never did, but tonight? Tonight he was pushing his luck on purpose.</p><p>The tears dry up and she feels the cold outside again, like it’s fueling the icy killer within her. The survivor and the saint, who are both equal parts covered in blood and sin, fuel the voice and the dead eyed glare she’s now looking up at him with. “I said get out.” It’s what he was pushing for and yet, his whole body seems to go slack with a bone crushing sorrow for a moment. She wants to kick him out? He’d wanted space anyway.</p><p>He can’t help but laugh, because that’s JUST what he’d been wanting. He said as much, throwing his hands up with a mean grin. “Oh! Is that all? Don’t mind if I do! This place was getting kind of small for my new operation anyway!” Their home was by no means a mansion, but it was anything but small. When you spend too much time with someone, it can make even the biggest space, feel 2 sizes too small. </p><p>He shoves past her and goes over to the couch. His socks and boots are conveniently sitting to the left of it. Angie’s watching him without much emotion and one chilling thought crosses her mind, as she watches him struggling to violently put his socks on. <em> ‘Oh sure. NOW is the night, when you remember to put on your boots.’ </em> This man was the world to her, but right now, he was just a wound on her heart.</p><p>Clearly burned by her, his face is cracking with a wild smile. A darkening expression is lurking behind his usually bright blue eyes. When he stands to his feet, he’s marching over to her so fast and reckless, it’s actually frightening. She leans away from him, but he just stands there seething. He has the balls to threaten her with something vile and he knows exactly what he’s doing. “All that cooking, sure got my blood pumping!” </p><p>He licks his lips again, his mouth dry and his chest tight. He’s all worked up and glaring at her statuesque expression, with her leaning closer to the edge, at his every word. “Has me itching for some action!” He’s shaking his head, mocking her with a huskiness to his voice, which alludes to something sad. “-I’m thinking baseball. Huh? You like baseball, Shortstop?” She’s not sure what’s he’s talking about at first. He turns on his boot heel and leaves a very empty spot between them.</p><p>It leaves a sting in her chest at the sight of his back. He’s darting over towards the coat rack, which sits right in front of the stairs and up against the doorframe, leading into their entry hall. He yanks his leather off it, carrying on at her. “I can think of at least 10 or 15 chicks, who LOVE baseball!” His sick innuendo, roils her guts and even has her running toward him, her stony face broken with the rage inside her, fueling her words. “-Go ahead then?! Do I LOOK like I’m stopping you?” </p><p>She’s already kicked him out and now, it’s just about how many more punches he can get in, before he’s gone. He jerks his jacket off the coatrack so hard, that the rickity wooden thing comes crashing down. It even breaks off a few of the blunt sticks attached to it. The sound is ugly, violent, and has him raising his voice back her, shoving his jacket on defiantly. “I’m hitting homeruns tonight, Angie!!” He’s making his way out into the entry hall, with her harping behind him now. “You couldn’t find HOMEPLATE if it smacked you in the head with a bat!” He’s nearly reached the door and it’s fairly certain, that all of Megaton has heard them arguing.</p><p>Standing at their front door with his hand on the handle, his blood is boiling. They’re both so angry, that nothing they say is thought out anymore. It’s nothing but blinding and bombastic emotion. He’s waving his hand at her with an angry glare, talking loudly at her again. “Oh! Oh ho, I’m gonna find it alright!” He takes his hand off the door and sneers at her, lasciviously. </p><p>She’s not sure why he’s looking at her like that, till he crosses his fingers behind his head and proceeds to do the most vulgar motions. Thrusting with his hips, leaned back and not breaking eye contact with her, her mouth falls open at the sight of him. He bites his lip and moans loudly, forcing her to blush hotly, equal parts disturbed and oddly aroused by him. The words falling out of his mouth, are enough to make her want to plant her boot right in his balls however. “-With Nova and Stacy and Gina and Cherry and-“ It just so happens, that in this hall there is a gun cabinet, with her old BB gun in the back of it.</p><p>So of course it’s the first thing she goes for when he starts naming names. The cabinet slams open and she’s aiming the gun at him so fast, that he’s barely got time to open the front door, before she fires. The bb ricochets off the wall and leaves him flinching a little, as the cool October wind comes howling inside their house and she’s crying now, unable to stop herself. “I’ll make your balls black AND blue if you do get the hell out of this house!” The wind is at his back now. It’s so cold, that he’s definitely not looking forward to leaving, but it’s far too late to change his mind.</p><p>He raises his hands up, stubborn and emotional, backing outside and trying to get the last word in. “DON’T HAVE TO ASK ME TWICE!” He then backs out of the front door, before hearing her scream, “LIMP DICKED IDIOT!” Shutting the door behind him. He’s running for his bike, faster than he can think and flicking the headlights on. It’s just about 10pm and everyone who might have been in bed, is listening intently to the famous wanderers’ lover’s quarrel.</p><p>He sits there for a minute, with his hands gripping the handlebars. He’s staring so hard at the dirt that it might catch on fire. He didn’t always think when he talked. Hell if he didn’t always mess shit up with her, whenever he did open his big mouth out in blind anger. That little ugly voice is saying, <em> ‘See? That’s what she gets! You’re an asshole! She shoulda put out! She shouldn’t take you for granted! This is her fault!’ </em></p><p>It’s eating away at him, now that he’s got time to breathe. He leans back in his seat, staring up at the night sky, stars looking distant and dull to him, the moon almost full. There’s another side of him, which hurts more than that little ugly voice. It’s a lot louder, now that he’s not next to her. <em> ‘She’s all you got and you’re gonna walk out on her like this? What are you leaving for? She supports your dumbass at every bend in the road! ’ </em>He takes a deep breath to slow it down.</p><p>Then another. He hears her from the kitchen window, sobbing. It makes him wince. His heart tries to lure him back into the house. His brain is still charged with rage and insecurity however, so he starts the engine on his bike instead.</p><p>Then the guilt hits him and his glare softens to an irritated scowl. He curses under his breath, feeling more than a little overwhelmed. “Shit…shit…shit…” He takes a deep breath, kicking up the stand on his bike, and rides it right out of the gate. As the ruins of Springville fly by, it is chilly outside. He rides the Broken Road, right up to the mine where 101 still lurks below.</p><p>He parks his bike at the foot of the mine, sitting on it and looking out over the dark, yet familiar sight of The Capital Wasteland. He was getting famous without her. He was dependable without her always hovering over his shoulder. He was his own man now. It should be enough for him, but it wasn’t.</p><p>Was it?</p><p>He’s reaching down into his saddlebag and pulling out a pack of cigarettes. He doesn’t smoke anymore. Hasn’t since he promised Susie, all those years ago. But sometimes, it calms his nerves and he started up again about 2 months ago. What changed 2 months ago?</p><p>Weren’t they happy?</p><p>He got this bike from Dusk. He got Angie to kiss him somehow. He was getting calls and bike parts on the daily and more responsibility was coming his way. That’s what he’d wanted since he was 16 right? The fame, the responsibility. </p><p>The chicks? He’s pulling a match out of his jacket’s inner lining, flicking open the carton. Pulling out a stick out with his teeth, he’s realizing what an idiot he’s being. One thing that he hated about getting older, was that he’d started to own up to his shortcomings. It was something that she’d told him, made her proud of him.</p><p>Thinking to himself, <em>‘No wonder she cracks under the pressure… being good isn’t easy…’</em> He’d held her when she cried before and knew that she wasn’t perfect, but she was definitely a “good person”. Even if she could be an annoying know-it-all glory hog, she was painfully “good”. In fact, she was still better than him. </p><p>Even though he’d finally reached her pedestal, he still wasn’t…”good” enough. He strikes the match and lights up, shaking the match to put it out. The smell of smoke fills the air, carried off on the wind. Staring blankly at the ruined town, sitting astride his bike and remembering the night she first kissed him. He’d never stop wanting to kiss her.</p><p>They were both vulnerable. He was only that way around her when it came down to it. Whether he wanted to think about it or not, that’s what she made him. Weak. Ugly. </p><p>Insecure. </p><p>She was so touchable that night in the water. Too beautiful for him to take. He’d felt safe to talk about his feelings with her and that felt really, really good. He couldn’t stop thinking about the way she made him feel. He’d been pretty sappy:</p><p><em> His voice is a vulnerable whisper, like thunder in the silence, ragged and crackling. “…I want you, to want me…” </em> He had said it in the moment, but he hadn’t forgotten it. He’s taking a drag of his cigarette, the rush of nicotine calming him down enough to have him, feeling sorry. Her voice comes to mind, what she’d said to him. She’d replied like it was a no brainer and he had believed her back then, when she said: <em> “…you don’t have to worry about that.” </em> </p><p>Her lips were so close to his, that it had scrambled his brains. She had him admitting things, which are still hard for him to fess up to even now. He felt secure enough to say it that night, because she’d kissed him. Finally, accepted him on some deeper level. At least that’s what he’d thought.</p><p>So then why was she still being skittish around him? Yeah, he felt like he was entitled to her. She was entitled to him if she wanted him! Sex was still out of his reach with her, even with his heart splayed wide open for her and that stung him. It terrified him actually.</p><p>She had all of him in the palm of her hand.</p><p>He’s blowing smoke, shaking his head. He can’t understand her. The thought is as cruel as it is straight from his dirty mangled heart. <em> ‘Am I still not good enough for you? Is that why?’ </em>She wasn’t just a friend. She was his best friend.</p><p>That used to be a comfort when he didn’t have anybody to depend on out here. Then here he was now, with a name of his own and the brains to survive. Being on his own, wasn’t an outright death sentence anymore. He wasn’t just a dumb Vaultie, who she had to watch over, not anymore. He didn’t <b>need</b> her to keep him from shooting himself in the foot anymore.</p><p>So if he didn’t need her to coddle him, where did that leave them? Still a team? Still best friends? Sure it did, because he’d never considered anyone more important to him in his whole life. That complacency and that comfort, used to be a breath of fresh air.</p><p>Now it was scaring him shittless, because she wouldn’t even put out for him.</p><p>His cigarette’s about gone and it’s hanging from his lip limply, like an afterthought. Searching himself for answers. He was afraid of messing everything up and losing her, so he was running away from it all. Like a coward. He takes the final drag of smoke, glancing behind him at the mineshaft, which holds the Vault door, apologizing to Susie silently.</p><p>He loved her with everything inside him and she wouldn’t even let him grab her tits.</p><p>The cigarette falls out of his mouth. His brain goes blank and his heart’s racing, but it’s not the tobacco. He’s zipping up his jacket because of the howling winds and revving the engine on his bike, trying to drown out his thoughts, with the roar of the beast. He felt like an open book when he wanted to be an encrypted code.</p><p>His face is red and so it the dying butt of his cigarette in the dirt, as he takes off back down the hill with the biting wind whipping at his face, bolting towards the open Wasteland. He plans to ride so fast and far, that his feelings get left in the dust. Somehow, even with Megaton behind him, he’s still searching for her tiny figure in front of him. He was losing his mind, trying to deny the fact, that he’d been the one to start this fight, without a good reason to.</p><p>He did have his reasons. A lot of them. A lot of churning, scary, disgusting reasons. One of them based on his own failings, insecurities, and bad choices. The other reason, too terrible to think about.</p><p>He loved the girl. He loved her and she knew it. He knew it too. They hadn’t ever said it out loud, but they both knew it. She knew it right?</p><p>So then, why the hell was he out here trying to get as far away from her as he could?</p><p>Even he didn’t know.</p><hr/><p>Meanwhile, back in the dark, dimly lit home of The Lone Wanderer, Evangeline’s just finished up the dishes and cried out all of her tears. The wind was so bad tonight, that she’d pulled the shutters on their kitchen window shut, then let the window itself slide down closed. She locked it tightly, in case Butch tried to sneak in. Which was a petty and silly thought, since he already had a key. Now she was left on the couch, with Dogmeat’s head in her lap.</p><p>The creature hadn’t stopped bothering her, since Butch had stormed out of the house. After threating to cheat on her. Also, after starting an argument just because he felt like it. She’s got a red flannel blanket around her legs and the house is lit just brightly enough for her to see where to walk, if she were to get up. She did not feel like getting up.</p><p>How dare he mention her father as if he wasn't worthy of idolizing? She'd never asked for the legacy she'd been given either way. She'd never had any real special treatment in the vault! Not when you consider the realties of the laws the Overseer had put in place to keep them all under control. She was not some spoiled little girl chasing after her father's wishes!</p><p>He was a good man. A kind man. Though she still felt bitter towards him for keeping so many secrets from her, James Blackwell was not just a hero in the end, but her <em>father</em>. A father she had to lose and a hero who she had aspired to be like. Entiled was one thing he was <strong>not</strong>.</p><p>Dogmeat whines at her, licking her hand, where it’s resting on her lap, as she cards the other through the wolfhound’s fur. She hated him. That’s what she had decided bitterly. When he came back, she’d give him all the caps he wanted to buy his own home. Then she’d pat him on the back, before changing the locks. </p><p>Childish and bad mannered as she knew it would be, that was her heart’s desire in that yellow tinged dimly lit living room. The darkness outside was more blue black than anything. The air smelled like winter, cold and frosty. The moonlight so bright, that it was coming in through the window’s shutters like it had a mind of its own. It was cold, quiet, and the house was creaking all around her, like it had ill intent.</p><p>She looks at the broken coatrack, its shattered pieces casting shadows across the floor. She finds the sight oddly unsettling. Her first thought, which isn’t filled to the brim with rage is: <em> ‘What if he never comes back?' </em>She’d cry if she hadn’t already spent all her tears on angry thoughts. The moonlight appears to be reaching in, glinting off of Butch’s Toothpick in its resting place.</p><p>The blade, catching her tired eyes with interest. The thought is still comforting, even if she’s still hurt over this pointless squabble. <em> ‘He’ll be back…he’d never leave all his stuff here…’ </em> What she wanted to think was, <em> ‘He’d never abandon me.’ </em>And to some extent, she did think that. Butch was loyal. </p><p>Even if they argued or grew apart, he’d still come back…. at least, if he had the choice and wasn’t lying dead somewhere. </p><p>It shocks her that tears still find her over that type of thinking, but of course, they still do. They always will. She sniffles and Dogmeat’s stretching his body funnily across the entire length of the couch. It’s enough to make her smile. The dog is so big, that’s she been securely trapped inside the corner by him. </p><p>His back paws are pressing into the other armrest firmly. His tail wags, as if he knows that she’s laughing at him. His back legs are flat like ham hawks. Dogmeat was the only other living being, which she trusted to stay at her side. It was him…and Butch.</p><p>She smiles, suddenly remembering the freshly opened letter. It was just left there beside Butch’s knife. A chill runs through her. It’s like an invisible cold, left over from the darkness outside of their house. It was still <b>their</b> house, whether Butch liked it or not.</p><p>At least for now.</p><p>She’s reaching for the ancient looking envelope. It strikes her as odd, being since she’d only had enough letters for 4 months’ worth of jobs, when it had first arrived. Now, when she holds it in her hands, she detects a musty sort of scent coming from it, almost like mold. It leaves her raising an eyebrow, because she hadn’t noticed it before. Determined to take her mind off of Butch’s irritatingly prickly behavior, she opens the envelope, to find another surprise. Though the envelope itself looks very old, the parchment inside is pure white and crisp, like it was straight out of a vault.</p><p>It’s pristine even.</p><p>It makes her hum to herself. It’s impossibly white actually. In fact, the longer she stares at it, the musty smell seems to leap out at her again. It even hurts her eyes. Though, that’s most likely just because she’d been crying for at least an hour or so.</p><p>She was imagining it. This paper couldn’t have been that bright. If anything, it was just the pure resentment of how perfect it appeared at first glance. Somehow, it bothered her, how perfect it appeared to be. White, sharp, and bright like the peerless and incomparable moonlight outside her kitchen window.</p><p>Her fingers trace the top of it. Removing the letter and finally reading the contents of it, her head throbs. Her head was sore, after being worn down by Butch. So the moment her eyes hit the black, scrawling calligraphy, they throb within her skull noticeably. A simple message, in a painstakingly alive black ink. </p><p>It seems to want to leap out at her from the page. She shakes her head, seeing the same 2 headed bird at the bottom right corner. Recognizing it as a rad raven, it’s drawn in charcoal, contrasting with the smoothness of the ink beside it. It is very realistic, seemingly glaring up at her with its 4 eyes and 2 beaks. It leaves a strange impression on her, as she reads what the letter contains:</p><p>
  <b>To the Esteemed Lone Wanderer and Her King Snake Companion,</b>
</p><p>
  <b>I implore of you both a very urgent task. There is a town stead, not far from D.C. where caravans and other folks have appeared to vanish, after entering the territory. It has begun to cause a stirring in our quiet home, as you can imagine. It is surely a plucky group of raiders, who have stationed themselves nearby. Preying on unwitting travelers or sojourners.</b>
</p><p>
  <b>I am writing to you from under Mt. St. Helen’s, expectantly awaiting your arrival. Our town is just below the mountain and my home lies there as well! It has stood for ages and I would very much like it to remain unmolested! If other ill reputes draw too close to our town, I fear the worst! I beg you two for immediate assistance!</b>
</p><p>
  <b>I bid you to come to the town below the Mount! We are a humble town of 25! I dare not tell you my name, lest a wayward soul find discord and discover who called for you! We are not unfriendly folk, however we are very private folks. In fact the coordinates within are as public as anything, yet frowned upon if shared. </b>
</p><p>
  <b>Once again, I bid you to come to Mt. St. Helens and solve this terrible calamity, which threatens all who dwell within!</b>
</p><p>
  <b>Please be as swift as you can!</b>
</p><p>
  <b>I fear the worst for my fellow man!</b>
</p><p>
  <b>-A Concerned Homeowner </b>
</p><p>Her eyes rove over the message, with a pit of foreign dread finding its way to sink into her belly. She closes the letter and slides it carefully back in the parchment. Shrugging it off as an eccentric person’s way of asking for help. Nothing odd about it, except for the wording. She is highly interested in the person who wrote to her.</p><p> After typing the coordinates into her Pipboy, it only leaves her craving to meet them. It even distracts her enough to forget Butch for a second. There is a mountain on her Pipboy, which is farther than she has ever walked before. It would have taken her months to walk that distance. That is, without the motorcycle it would have taken her that long.</p><p>Begrudgingly, she realizes that there is a much faster way to travel. A way, which requires her partner’s permission and having to talk to him again. She sinks back into the couch cushions.  It had escaped her notice, that the letter had put her on the edge of her seat. Dogmeat’s tail is still wagging and thumping against the couch.</p><p>She’s hurt. It’s not something she’s used to feeling. She’s generally pretty thick skinned. It used to be, that Butch was the one person who she’d kept out of her heart at all times. That was a long time ago and even back then, he managed to get under her skin. </p><p>She gets up off the couch, dislodging Dogmeat’s head, letting the blanket fall to the floor.</p><p>She glances at the letter again. Her gaze being drawn to it inexplicably. Then, she looks at Toothpick. The small blade, representing a small part of both Butch’s and her own past. There was a time when he would threaten to cut her with it. </p><p>He could cut her without it now. Deeper even. That fact felt awful in a way that shook her to her core. She makes her way to the staircase, turning out the lights, amplifying the moonbeams intensely. The white of the letter reflects it like a mirror, which is implausible.</p><p>Forcing her to stare at its perfect surface, The Lone Wonderer has the compulsion to burn the letter. It feels as if it is alive in some strange way. She stalks up the stairs instead, looking from his empty bedroom on her left, to her own on the right. She could wait for him in his bed. Perhaps then he would probably forgive her, for whatever stupid faultless crime she’d committed against him. </p><p>She was usually the bigger person between them.</p><p>Then a big part of her screams in outrage. She no longer wants to be that person. The one who will put up with him no matter what. It was easier, before she’d allowed the physical to happen between them. She’d fought it off for so long, that it was only natural to have a moment of weakness. </p><p>It had her questioning if these last few months had been idiotic weakness? If he wanted to apologize, he could come to her in the morning. She wasn’t sure if she’d be ready for it and that was a feeling she’d never had before. She ends up bringing her Pipboy to bed, hoping he might reach out. She checks her inbox 5 times. </p><p>There’s nothing. It’s enough to make her want to scream. Instead she closes her eyes and falls into a fitful sleep. In the night, she ends up ignoring the sound of Dogmeat yapping and the front door, as it unlocks, opens and shuts. Begrudgingly, it helps her to know that he came back home.</p><p>She’d left her bedroom door cracked open for him. When it opens wider, she pretends to be asleep, unable to face him. Shutting her eyes, she listens intently. She hears him take a deep breath and walk closer. She doesn’t know what to expect, but when the scent of smoke and whiskey hits her, she knows he’d been drinking.</p><p>At least he’s not ok either.</p><p>She hears him muttering to himself quietly, feeling him gingerly draw his fingers down the side of her cheek. “…’m just not good enough…” Then he just leaves her there with that and it’s bittersweet. She decides to forgive him in the morning, but only if he apologizes. She needed it this time. She had forgiven him so much that she didn’t realize, that she still needed that out of him. </p><p>He’d already said sorry enough. She hated fighting with him too. Still, they generally found a way to work through it. This time it felt heavier though. Maybe it was because it was the first time they’d truly fought, after…well the increase in intimacy between them.</p><p>The next morning when she woke up, he was making breakfast like nothing had happened. He looked at her and said, “…You like your bacon crispy, doncha?” And it felt cheap to her. He couldn’t say anything about it at all? Really? </p><p>There was so much she wanted to say to him in that moment. She wanted to say that he was good enough. She wanted to say that she loved him. She wanted to say she needed him more than he needed her. But he didn’t say sorry and he didn’t even act like anything was wrong.</p><p>So she didn’t say a word.</p><hr/><p>It’s been a day or two since their latest fight. They were speaking to each other civilly, but it felt forced. It didn’t usually take this long for them to make up. In fact, it was taking a lot longer than it should and it was effecting them both. Butch hadn’t stopped cooking them meals or taking care of the house.</p><p>But sometimes he overcooked the meat or forgot to finish whatever repair he’d been doing, leaving it half done. After he’d gotten home that night, he hadn’t said a word about wanting his own place. Which left her to agonize over whether he had meant it or not. She’d been a lot colder toward him. She spoke in shorter sentences and didn’t ask him anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary.</p><p>It was on the third day, which she had brought up the letter and the job. Butch had halfheartedly shrugged, in the midst of fixing a stitch on a pair of old jeans. “Fine, fine…whatever. Let’s go…” There was something in his eyes, as he looked up at her from where he sat at the kitchen table, that she had wanted to call hope. He’d become very hard to read over night. Distant, yet still beside her.</p><p>He hadn’t even bothered to read the letter either. Uncharacteristically, he basically defaulted to her being in charge. Normally, he’d put his two cents in about everything and anything, from the gear they were taking, to the route they would use. It bothered her, that he had gone so quiet on her. It left her to think about his motives.</p><p>Was he guilty? Was he planning to move out? Was this too hard now that they were… what were they? Perhaps this was him softening the blow? The tension was driving her up the wall and it left her unable to think straight.</p><p>That was the general mood between them for days. Even after they were on the road and sharing his bike. It wasn’t until they’d pitched camp on the 4th day of this awkward air between them, that she finally said something to break the tension. “Can we go back to being friends already?” Butch looks up from the game he’d been playing on his Pipboy. He’s sitting cross legged on his sleeping bag, the two of them in a cavern, with a small fire going.</p><p>His expression turns nervous in a heartbeat, when he responds to her. “Aren’t we more than that?” Her heart flutters for the first time in days. If he still thought they were, then she hadn’t changed her heart towards him either. There was no avoiding him now. They’d left Dogmeat home and so it was just the two of them. 2 Wanderers on a job with a heavy burden between them. </p><p>There was nothing to distract either of them from this conversation happening. They’re both dressed in their jeans and t-shirts, boots off and jackets off, ready for bed. She feels her face harden a bit. She wasn’t the type to be bitter, but she’s unable to stop herself from bringing it up. “Did you have fun playing baseball with Nova?” His face burns brightly, clearly not expecting her to remember that comment.</p><p>His expression is stubborn and sheepish at the same time. The sound of a “game over” comes out of his Pipboy, like the universe is just nailing her comment in harder. He clears his throat, tugging on the collar of his t-shirt, as if it’s strangling him. He rubs the back of his neck tripping over his own feelings. “I didn’t… I…I shouldn’t have said that… “He trails off, with his hands in his lap limply.</p><p>There was a lot of stuff he shouldn't have said.</p><p>She’s crossing her arms and hugging herself, feeling defensive, while looking out at the mountain’s valley. Rocky crags and sparse pines, rest outside of the cavern they’ve taken refuge in, the night sky bright with stars and a full moon glowing obnoxiously. She’s still upset about it, the argument and the prolonged silence. She can’t hide the anger and it shows in her tone. “Do you really want your own place?” The words have him looking at her anxiously, afraid to answer.</p><p>He knows what he should say, but he’s not going to lie to her. He owes her the truth and even in midst of admitting it, she still looks like the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. “…I just need some space alright? Can you get off my back?” She never asked for this. She never begged him to come with her. All those years ago, he was the one who’d invited her to join him and his silly little gang.</p><p>
  <em>He's sitting at the Muddy Rudder. He looks tired and bedraggled. First time out of the vault. He sees her and starts grinning. She can't remember what they talked about, but recalls the way he lights up when he says, "Hey! You know what? You'd be perfect for my gang! What do you say? The Tunnel Snakes could ride again!...or you know? Slither again! Whatever." </em>
</p><p>She can’t remember a time when they weren’t together after that. It dawns on her that maybe he has a point. It doesn’t make her feel better. Instead, it make her want to slap him. She nails him with a crushing blow, crippling him. “Are we over?”</p><p>He wasn’t prepared for it. At all. She feels a certain kind of pleasure at the panic he exudes. She waves her hand between them, chin held high, barking at him roughly. “Whatever the hell this is …or was?” His heart stops.</p><p>All at once everything in him is screaming, <em> ‘Hell no! I’m never letting you get away! I don’t care how much you hate me!” </em> He’s staring at her like a kicked dog, confused and yet, losing her would tear the ground right out from under him. He melts into mush, reaching out to her on a terrified impulse, letting his softer feelings get the better of him. “Wh-why would you say that?” She knows the ball is in her court now. She doesn’t want it to be over either, but it feels good to watch him squirm. </p><p>Her thoughts are darting back to that night. The threats and the prideful way he’d talked down to her, like he was some big shot now. Between how he had blamed her for dragging him down and the way he’d used sex as an excuse to walk out on her, it was utterly infuriating. She’s getting to her feet and looking down at him, more hurt than she’d expected. Her tone is monotone, robotic. “Because all I do is hold you back.”</p><p>Then the fire inside her starts to flare up, her fists balled at her sides. She needles him with another fact. “And I don’t put out… so tough shit.” He’s sorry, she can see it all over his wounded face, but this is too much. She never thought he’d want to leave her of his own accord. She’s gritted her teeth, before taking a deep breath to steady herself.</p><p>She turns away, collecting herself, her voice eerily even. “And apparently, you’re sick of me. For what it’s worth, you don’t have to stay if you feel trapped, Butch.” The words burned in her throat. She didn’t feel anything after they were out either. Just numb and oddly betrayed. She just wanted to get away from him.</p><p>His expression is looking sorrier with every passing phrase, but she’s not feeling it. She feels shut off. The kind of steel she got, when death was at her door and survival meant being devoid of fear. Barren of any emotion, she’s walking towards the cavern entrance. When he watches her back retreating, it snaps something inside him.</p><p>He’s scrambling to his feet, rushing to find the words to say that will fix this. “Don’t- don’t go out there alone! I was wrong, Ok?” She’s taking a step back and fighting not to look at him. She’s remembering the times that they’d forgotten. She thinks back to the vault. Who they used to be.</p><p>She would watch him from afar and he would always glare back full of hatred. For all her young life she was left to wonder why he blamed her for all the bad deeds which had befallen him in his world. But she knows why. He told her himself. He was jealous, envious, and blamed his own shortcomings on her.</p><p>She wasn't entitled and the fact was, he was just staring at her life with rose colored glasses. The fame, the glory? She earned that with blood and sorrow. It was not a game and she was not a mythical being. She dared him to suffer what she'd suffered and say that life had <em>spoiled </em>her.</p><p>He reaches out to her and wraps his fingers around her bicep. “…come on…look at me, would you?” Boiling in her own thoughts, she jerks her arm out of his grip, yelling at him. “-Don’t TOUCH me!” It was his jealousy, insecurity, and fears which she had no control over. That’s what possessed him to lash out 4 nights ago. It was the shit she couldn’t fix, that she’d thought he’d outgrown. </p><p>Had he ever been different or had she simply been blinded by their friendship?</p><p>No matter how many times she told him she was proud of him or encouraged him, apparently it was still her fault. It was still her fault that he still saw himself to be a failure. He still had the balls to blame her. That realization, smacked into her so hard it made her see red. Was she forever destined to take the blame for things that weren’t even her fault?  </p><p>Just one more damn responsibility that was being shoved onto her without remorse? </p><p>Her head nearly flies off her neck, when she turns to look back at him. Her eyes are full of seething rage, which he hasn’t felt the burn of in quite some time. It leaves him breathless, intimidated by the raging beast of a woman who’s now staring daggers at him. Her voice cuts him. “-I’m going out to check the tripwires.” She’s going for her boots, walking around him, and leaning down to shove them on violently, his long overdue apology, doing nothing to calm her. “-I’m sorry! Alright? I didn’t mean any of it!”</p><p>Of course he is. She knows that. She knew it even after he woke up and made breakfast on day one. But apparently, repressing things is unhealthy. So without her usual control and ability to forgive him, she snaps. </p><p>Retreating to the outside of the cave, revealing her festering wounds in an explosive manner. “-You haven’t changed at all!” He’s following after her, only to have her words stop him like a bullet. “It’s not my fault you don’t feel like you’re good enough for anything!” That hurts him like nothing else ever has. He looks heartbroken, when she rounds on him taking a step toward him, lost in the bitterness within herself. “It’s not my fault you’re a failure! It’s not my fault you constantly think that about yourself!” He can’t move or breathe or even speak.</p><p>She’s last person, who he ever wanted to hear those words from. She’s standing at the threshold of the cave, spent and breathing harshly. She’s saying it out of breath, cruelty fueling her voice. “So stop blaming me for it!” She’s hardened her heart up to the point where the look of rejection on Butch’s face doesn’t reach her. It takes a minute, for it to register.</p><p>She went too far.</p><p>Butch’s eyes are stark and desolate, his hand still reaching for her, now limply at his side. It’s heartbreaking to see him look like that. It’s like she betrayed his biggest secret and used it to rend him in his chest. She wants to take it back, but she can’t and quite frankly, it’s still the truth of things. She doesn’t have time to debate that soul shattered expression's severity, because after the heartbreak, comes Butch’s default. </p><p>Pure unbridled, child-like rage. She’s turning on her boot heels, leaving him behind, when a bowl shatters against the cavern wall. It’s far away from her, but it’s still an ugly display. He expresses his pain, by picking up her sleeping back and tossing it out after her. Bellowing, the sound of his voice earsplitting as it bounces off the cavern walls. “Yeah?! Well you haven’t changed either, Nosebleed!” </p><p>He’s yelling at her and she doesn’t have the heart or the patience to turn back. “<b>You’re still a heartless fucking bitch!” </b> She retreats outside, missing the way, he crumbles down to the ground, defeated. His eyes following her around the corner, till she’s gone and he’s in tears, he’s so damn mad. “I HAVE changed! … I have! What the hell? I’m still trying aren’t I? I’m still… I’m <b>here</b> aren’t I?” He didn’t want to be like this, but he was what he was. She was right about him though.</p><p>He took things out on her. He blamed her. He didn’t always treat her right. His feelings and the comfort of her arms, were unsettling to him. He was just waiting for it to fall apart, because it was too good to be true most days.</p><p>He finds his way to his sleeping bag, falling flat on his back. Rubbing his ears with the palms of his hands, actual tears staining his cheeks and burning his skin. He’s muttering to himself, feeling like a wreck. “…It’s not my fault that you see good where it’s not even there…” They haven’t fought like this…ever actually. He recounts that statement though, because they had only ever fought like this back in the vault.</p><p>It felt like ancient history repeating itself. He didn’t know how to fix it either. He wanted to though. He really, really did. He smothers the fire after an hour without her, tired of staring into the flames, stuck in his own head.</p><p> When she comes back, he’s still awake enough to hear her come in. He debates rising up and saying something mean, but thinks better of it. Her boots are kicked off lightly and she sighs, like she’s tired. She’s walking back outside and it’s with a great sense of satisfaction, that he hears her dragging her sleeping bag back inside. Pleased that she had to go get it.</p><p>He’s still, just listening, still angry with her. Then, it all drains out of him, when he hears her sobbing from beneath her sleeping bag. He hates the sound of it, because it’s painful to hear. He never wanted to make her cry… never again.</p><p>He should have gotten up and held her. He should have just opened up and been honest, instead of starting shit. She was sorry too…she had to be. That’s not what he did though. Instead, he thought to himself, <em> ‘What did I do? I had her! I had her and now I’m afraid of keeping her? Is that it?!’ </em>Perhaps that was it.</p><p>He didn’t know how to hold onto the one he loved enough to die for.</p><p>Then he laid awake all night, unable to sleep, even after her sobs grew silent.</p><hr/><p>Things take a turn on the road in the days that follow.</p><p>What would have been a trip that lasted months, ending up lasting days. The two would come to realize, just how thankful they would be, to live far, far away from Mt. St. Helens. It was the day after they’d left the cave and the two were still caught in that awful silence. Neither of them had settled the fact, of just exactly where they both stood in this partnership. It was driving them both insane, but no apologies were made and nothing was spoken about.</p><p>They are now in a very flat desert. It looks like what they’ve gotten used to from The Capital Wasteland. The terrain had been very, very different for days. After having left the rocky valley that they’d had to pass through just to get to this very empty road, it felt familiar. It was comforting to see a place that felt similar to home.</p><p>They approach a fork in the road with an old sign post, which reads Providence Ave. to the right and Benefit St. to the left. Angie’s holding onto his waist, still as wordless as ever. Cutting the engine, they roll to a stop before the sign and he states it soberly for her to digest properly. “I don’t want to be over…” He feels her cheek lift off of his back, her puzzled voice taunting him. “…What?” Instead of turning to look at her, he looks down at the strong, feminine hands around his midsection.</p><p>Repeating himself tersely. “We’re not over! Alright?” Her voice is infuriatingly detached behind him. “…we’re… not over?” He stopped everything they were doing, just to get the words out and now she’s hard of hearing?  He squeezes her hand tighter, his voice hoarse, and it’s the first thing that they’ve said to each other since they’d woken up. “No, we’re not!” She’s gone utterly silent behind him and it’s a little terrifying to him.</p><p>Why was she being this way?</p><p>It has him grinding his teeth. So he yells like they’re about to have another verbal sparring match. “HATE ME IF YOU WANT! I don’t care!” Bracing himself, waiting for her to reject him, carrying on with a tortured muttering. “I’m not letting you say we’re over…” The two of them are at a crossroads on this journey. She’s said it many times and this time, is less reassuring than it should be. “…I don’t hate you, Butch.” </p><p>She’s starting to see a pattern that may or may not be healthy. She lets him lace his fingers with hers, splaying them out. Her quiet words leave her whole being deflated behind him. “…I could never hate you.” He’s thankful for even such a small victory. He wants to tell her that he cares about her too much to let her go, but somehow, the words escape him.</p><p>Before the two can say another word, they are both cut off by a bloodcurdling scream. The noise echo's for miles, as Butch exclaims, “WHAT WAS THAT?!” Blood is now thrumming through their veins, both of them ready for a fight. They pull apart and they are accosted by an abhorrent sight. There is a scrawny, ghoulish figure approaching from down the abandoned and dusty road, known to them as Benefit Street. </p><p>Butch’s hand flies to the silenced .44 on his hip out of habit. Angie hops off their vehicle with her shotgun swung out and aimed at whatever’s coming their way. Angie looks at Butch, but Butch is too busy squinting at the humanoid creature shuffling toward them. It’s frame walking in jagged and clumsy zigzags. Its joints crack and bend, like it is in agony with every step.</p><p>He just can't bring himself to look away from it.</p><p>At first they assume it’s a feral, till it gets closer and closer, revealing the very gaunt face of a woman unraveled. The sight of her is gut churning, though the pair are used to mutants and mutilation by now. It’s not even the most grotesque of tumors that they’ve seen, but the way the woman is cackling and jibbering at them in broken English, leaves them struck still right where they both stand. “It’s scratching from below-<b> <em>gof’nn mnahn’mg phlegeth uaaah- AAAAAH-rotting inside the bones!“ </em> </b></p><p>Her voice is garbled and cracked as if her bones are breaking. Her skin is ashen grey and wretched to witness, as it appears to boil and pustule beneath the surface. Butch’s gagging in front of her, with his free hand on his mouth. Evangeline takes a step around him, only to have him put a hand on her shoulder. She looks up at him to see a face, which she hadn’t braced herself for.</p><p>The fear is there, yet resolve covers it, as if he’s facing death itself for her.</p><p>His tone is pleading, yet hard as stone. “Don’t. I know you. I know what you’re gonna do, but please. Please, don’t.“ </p><p>The woman is still coming for them, her clothing made of sackcloth. Her frail body is all jagged edges and bubbling flesh. Evangeline looks her over, halfheartedly acknowledging Butch’s plea with a shaky voice, lowering her shotgun. “…if I got a better look, maybe I could-“ as if sensing their eyes on her the woman freezes in a tangle of limbs and locks eyes with The Lone Wanderer. Evangeline had thought, that she had run out of fear a long time ago.</p><p>But when that woman’s pitch black, devilish eyes met hers as if seeing into her soul, it did make her chest tighter and her grip tighten on her gun. Like a monster, it…her? This woman no longer appeared to be a woman or even a feral, but something broken and abnormal. When she raises a boney finger and points to her, it is…creepy to put it lightly. </p><p>Which Butch points out childishly, now standing at her side, instead of at her back. “That? That is creepy and wrong- not a patient!” She elbows him in the ribs lightly, quick to scold him. “Be quiet and don’t take your hand off your gun.” Then she lays her shotgun on the ground and approaches the now smiling person…creature? The more she stares and the closer she gets, the woman starts looking more and more….wrong. Its face is flat and its eyes are sunken, a maw of sharp teeth in it’s far too large mouth. She’s starting to agree with Butch’s assessment, but before she can think to tell him to shoot, the abomination speaks and it leaves her skin crawling.</p><p>“Beneath the mountain…beneath the mount...upside down under…Lone Wanderer…”</p><p>Its bone saw like voice stops forever, becoming a chemical kind of melting pot. Its form turns into a pile of dust right before her eyes, leaving her reeling back. A grey spore cloud now lingering where the frail woman once occupied. Butch’s fingers coil around her wrist and pull her back to his motorcycle, sounding a lot like the boy, who’d first popped his head out of the vault. “NOPE! NO! NO WAY! We are not doing this! That town can eat it, I’m out!” She was not so easily deterred.</p><p> Wrestling her arm out of his grip, she remembers who she is and why they’re here. “BUTCH! Let me go and get a grip!” </p><p>The tall, burly Tunnel Snake looks at her as if she’s gone crazy, his cool completely lost. “Get a grip?!”</p><p>He’s gesturing to the dissipating ash pile that was once a person with his whole body, waving his hands. “That? See that?” He’s glaring at the black circle on the dirt road, accusingly and giving her a pointed look, yelling at her. “THAT USED TO BE A PERSON!” Rolling her eyes, she puts aside her own unease and rationalizes, scoffing at his theatrics. “Oh please! You haven’t ever seen FEV before? Muties?” He’s holstering his gun and dropping his hands a top her shoulders, begging her. “That’s not a Mutie, Angie!” He’s praying to shake a little sense into her and feeling wrong about this whole trip in a way he can’t explain.</p><p>She’s seen a lot of things out here. So many awful, terrible things, including beings that were out of this world and beyond her wildest nightmares. Ferals, Deathclaws, and even little green men. So no, she had never seen anything like this before, but so what? There was usually an explanation for things and even then, as long as she could kill it, it didn’t matter.</p><p>She tells him as much, wiggling out of his grasp and walking over towards the completely dissipated cloud of spores. “It’s dead right? So suck it up and get ready to see a lot more of…whatever that was.” Butch’s reaching to drag her back, but she’s too fast and already covering her nose and mouth with a rag to keep from breathing in the black dust. His protests fall on deaf ears behind her. “Angie! Get back here!” However, she’s already standing over the dry black pile and nudging the edge of it with her boot. It appears to swirl and sink, being very arid and light.</p><p>Amongst the forlorn pile, a collection of moldering grey fungi are starting to rot. They turn as black as its dusty spore like neighbors, the heavy blackening lumps resembling tumors. She has an epiphany, which comforts her. She stands up straight and turns to see Butch pacing beside his bike. He’s got an ugly, serious look on his face. </p><p>In the midst of the encounter, they’d forgotten to keep quiet and it felt… it felt lighter between the two of them somehow. They were still a good team and they still looked out for one another and that realization, brought her strength. Approaching him confidently, she tries to give him the news without yelling it too loudly. “There was some kind of grey mold inside her.” The revelation has Butch looking at her, like she’s the one with mushrooms in her head. His voice is still hyper aware and pitchy, but despite that, he’d still stood beside her while confronting the thing. “Why are you telling me that for? That’s disgusting! I don’t want to know that-“</p><p>She’s picking her shotgun up and trotting over to the bike’s saddlebag. Shoving the weapon inside, she’s interrupting his complaints absentmindedly. “- And that’s a pile of spores over there! She must have eaten them or touched them!” Angie shoves the rag back in her back pocket, pointing to the pile. Using her voice of reason, to try and calm him down. “So, I’m going to assume that’s what turned her into that!” Butch scoffs derisively and narrows his eyes at her. “Oh cool! NOW I feel great! EVERYTHING’S ALL BETTER NOW!”</p><p> Sarcasm dripping from his mouth like venom. The man was so big and yet so afraid, and it was more than a little unsettling to her. He’d gotten a lot braver, so it was odd that he felt so freaked out over one new kind of corpse. She walks past him and kicks up the stand holding the bike up. Talking back to him, she decided to put all the emotional uproar on hold so they can stay focused on the mission at hand. “Look, whoever wrote that letter needs help and this world hasn’t killed me yet!”</p><p>She’s walking the bike around the sign post and Butch is trying to grab the handles back from her, questioning her motives. “Just where do you think you’re going with my hog?” She’s explaining herself, giving him a stern look. “We’re going to start it off the road! I don’t want to risk knocking that dust pile up and breathing in those spores. So quit dragging your feet.” While she talks and turns on her survival brain, he keeps looking back over at the pile with dread. “-I’m not running away! I’m not a coward and I’m not afraid to face the unknown!” Butch’s stopping her in her tracks, begrudgingly taking the handles from her. Walking beside her with it, his voice is fighting her the whole way. “Alright! ALRIGHT! I get it! You’re a bleeding heart who’s willing to die for a bunch of strangers! I get that already! Geez…” </p><p>His sentiments aren’t as soft as usual, but at least he’s not trying to turn around and leave her.</p><p>In the days that follow, she will soon wish that she had listened to him.</p><hr/><p>After being accosted by the spore creature, the two would find themselves once again traveling on the road. The two of them both dreading the worst, with Butch having made up his mind to pipe up about turning back every mile or so. Thankfully, the roar of the engine drowned it out. The further they went, the closer they had begun to approach what looked like a massive looming construct.</p><p>The emptiness of the desert soon began to change in their peripherals, having more of a rocky, lumpy type of structure to it.</p><p>The massive dark formation ahead of them, is perhaps one of the largest mountains that either of them have ever seen. It’s tall enough to block out the light of the sun and casts a shadow across the flatlands around it for miles, it’s reaching fingers creeping malevolently across the desert. Another humanoid shape begins to form along the road, just at the edge of the shadow. Butch slams his hands down on the brakes hard enough to leave them crunching, forcing them both to jerk forward gracelessly. The Lone Wanderer’s unable to keep quiet about it, her voice husky in his ear. “What the hell, Butch?“</p><p>His eyes are sharp, due to his talent as a sniper, so being at the front of the bike and having arguably better sight, he sees it much sooner than she does. His voice is steadier than he feels. “About 1 click ahead of us. It’s a… -a person?” He couldn’t make out the features, but it walked upright like a person. Lots of things walked upright like a person though. He really would like to not let another monster catch them off guard again.</p><p>The two are saved from morbid speculation, when the voice of a woman, rises up politely, walking out of the mountain’s looming reach. “Hello up there!” Evangeline’s peering up over his shoulder, assessing the stranger. The closer the stranger gets, the more it becomes clear that she is sporting odd attire. Her dress is Pre-War and covered in lemons, her tone altogether too pleasant for her liking. “Have you come for a visit? The town’s just behind me, don’t you know?”  Butch is talking low to her, with an unfriendly look on his face. “Angie, if this doesn’t feel off to you- I think you’re losing your touch.”</p><p>Of course it’s strange. She scoffs at him, having seen much stranger things than a well-dressed woman, walking down an empty road. “It’s nothing we can’t handle. What are you so scared about? Just grow a pair and follow my lead.” She’s hopping off the bike, Butch’s protests falling behind her, as she walks onward. The woman is going at a leisurely pace, unperturbed by the harshness of the Wasteland around her. The Lone Wanderer greets her with a diplomatic tone, aware of the dangers that might be around them. “Who are you?” She’s got her hand on her 10mm and watching the woman’s figure approaching.</p><p>Her hair is dark brown, resembling a brunette curtain in its bone straight appearance. Her complexion is olive and her smile is oddly Victorian. Her voice is too polite for this kind of atmosphere, the Mountain an abnormally dark blue-grey, it’s very existence directly at odds with the orange sands and desert around it. “Elmira, my dear! It’s such a pleasure to finally meet you, Lone Wanderer!” She wasn’t unaccustomed to being recognized, but somehow, as the two of them finally came face to face, she did not have the desire to shake the woman’s outstretched hand. Butch is behind her, the motorcycle humming back to life beneath him with a dull roar.</p><p>He rolls after her slowly, catching up to the two much quicker than if he were on foot. Butting into the conversation, he’s now at Evangeline’s side with the engine cut off, regarding the woman before them testily. “Alright, Lady. I don’t know what act you’re pulling, but that sundress you’re wearing? Isn’t gonna cut it in this nuclear winter blowing our way.” Waving his hand at her, then pointing back the way they came, he’s cutting to the point. “And we just ran into a monster, that looked a lot like it crawled right out of that shadow. The one you’re standing in so damn cheerfully-“ Elmira’s cheerful demeanor, rubs him the wrong way, as she addresses him by his last name, without being given it. “-And this must be Mr. Deloria! That rabble rousing King Snake we’ve all been just jonesing to meet!” She offers her hand to him as well, which Butch regards with a weirded out distain.</p><p>Angie’s hitting her surly companion in the shoulder, before turning her attention back to the stranger. She’s nodding ahead of them, eager to reach their destination. “I take it you’re from the town-stead Mrs. Elmira? I’m assuming that’s how you know our names?” Withdrawing her hand with a shadow of distaste in her eyes, Elmira’s mask is soon back in place, still speaking politely to the both of them. “Heavens, but where are my manners? Yes! Of course I know you! Both of you! From the radio show!” Butch’s refusing to park his bike entirely, leaning on it and sounding edgy, without the hope of relaxing. “-Radio show? You mean GNR?” Nodding her head, she seems utterly un-phased by the mountain behind them or the Wasteland itself. “Why yes! The Lone Wanderer and her Rowdy Compatriot, The King Snake, are always the favorite pair amongst the youngsters in town!” </p><p>Evangeline is growing impatient, fiddling with her gun holster, and scanning the dark horizon over the sunny woman’s shoulder. “So you know what’s going on? What’s happening under the mountain?” Some soft, uncanny emotion, flitters in Elmira’s eyes, only to vanish, with her voice leaning towards eerie pleasantries. “Golly, I’m not sure if there’s any real happenings or “goings on” about town! Much to my dismay. I must admit we are a quiet town. Oh, but we’re all just aching to meet you both!” Her eyes are dark and fixated on Butch’s in a way that leaves the man wanting to recoil, though there’s not much understanding as to why. When she speaks it begins to sound very hollow and “put on”. “Our happy town of just 25! We’re all very humble folk. Yes, indeed! I’m afraid we’re all much too quiet and withdrawn under St. Helens!” She digs her boot’s toe into the dirt, sheepish and yet off putting all at once. “Well, except for Mr. Howard! Very eccentric that one-“</p><p>Angie’s brow furrows, her hands fishing for the letter, which she’d been keeping in the inner lining of her jacket. She breaks into the odd tangent of the even odder woman, by showing her the letter with the ancient seal. “-I think we’re getting off topic. Do you know who might have sent this letter?” Butch’s eyes look to the letter and then at Elmira, scrutinizing, huffing at her. “Why didn’t you guys just reach out through our terminal network? It’s faster. Been up for months. Three Dog wouldn’t shut about it…” The crooked and abrupt way, in which the woman’s neck inclines, leaves him wondering how her head didn’t just snap off of her shoulders. It’s the first time her tone has sounded anything less than pleasant and her expression, is like a thin coat of paint, hiding something grotesque behind its iridescent veneer. “Our town has stood for centuries. We find change abhorrent. The old ways are best.”</p><p>Butch’s face twists into an ugly grimace, looking her up and down, somehow cowed by her diminutive stature. “Whatever, lady…” Before he can say anything else, the saccharin smile is fixed on Elmira’s mouth once more and her eyes lock with The Lone Wanderer’s, after she takes the letter and merely glances at its contents. It is quick. Far too quick for her to be able to have read a word of it. Her answer is enthusiastic and reminds Evangeline of a much more off putting Moira Brown. “Why, this does look like Howard’s doing! What a funny old coot!”</p><p>Butch’s snapping at the woman, unable to forget the dark ash pile behind them. “You ever seen a person melt into ashes before? I’ll bet that would put a little salt in your “everything’s just rosy” attitude...” His body’s leaning closer to Angie’s, whether out of fear or protective instinct, it’s hard to say. Her face is unchanged, handing the letter back to The Wanderer, her fingers brushing Angie’s and leaving a very unexplainable chill running up her arm. Angie’s fighting the urge to get away from Elmira’s oppressive presence, needling the woman about her attire. “He’s got a point. It’s not safe out here. Do you have a weapon to defend yourself?” She wants to perceive this lemon covered woman as harmless, but she’s not so stupid, that she’d forget the reality of it.</p><p>The Wasteland was full of cannibals, liars, and anyone who spoke as politely as Elmira, was usually hiding an ugly secret. Suspicion takes the lead and it’s only natural, that she’s taking a slight step back towards Butch. Her questioning mirrors her body language, although the Wanderer has a diplomatic smile gracing her lips. “Why are you travelling this way? You don’t look like you’re dressed for a fight and it’s going to be freezing tonight.” The air between the three is uneasy and that’s a good enough reason for Angie not to take her hand off her holstered weapon. She traces it like she’s petting an old friend at her hip.</p><p>Elmira’s eyes are dark and Butch watches her with an itch on the back of his neck. He can’t shake it. He can’t ignore it. He feels like he’s staring at a shark. When Elmira points her bony little finger in their direction, it’s a disturbing mirror image of the creature that had proceeded her.</p><p>The duo’s collective blood pressure spikes when the woman answers obviously. “Oh, don’t you fret over me! I know how to take care of myself! There’s a local swap-meet I frequent, just there! Look now! In the distance.” Both of them know better than to both look at once. So, instead, Angie attempts to press the issue, because they had just come from a very long stretch of long empty scenery. “We’ve been traveling for days and we haven’t seen anyone apart from you.” She tacks it on silently in her mind, <em> ‘…and that spore creature.’ </em>Irritated, when Butch jostles her shoulder, his voice lowered, not friendly or hostile. “…uh…hey…I’m not losing my mind right? Look.”</p><p>She turns her attention to him, to snap at him, but follows where he’s pointing far off into the empty desert. She can’t help but get stuck on the blurred and sweltering image in front of her. There. Just at the edge of the shadow, are a collection of tents and a bustling market. People are congregating or shapes that appear alive at the very least.</p><p>Resembling a mirage, the heat of the sun, is being reflected off the reddish orange sand and rising in waves. Yet, it’s still cold. It’s still very cold and it’s very hard for her to accept that she’d missed such a large gathering. The longer she looks, the more the figures seem to melt and blur into each other, too far away to ever touch and striking her as completely unreachable. Butch’s voice is falling farther away in her ear, and the longer she searches the distant market stalls, which are fading in and out of her sight, between pin prinks of shimmering lights and irregularly sharp edges, the more her brain begins to swell behind her skull. “How far up the road is it? We’re just trying to take care of business and then high tail it out of here.”</p><p>Elmira’s voice startles her, louder and much sharper than her companion’s had been. “With that contraption you’ve been riding, it’ll be no more than an hour past 5 ‘o clock I’m sure! St. Helens welcomes you to stay for as long as you’d like!” Angie’s head is filling with a foul collection of imaginations, her voice cracking a bit, fighting to tear her gaze away from the strange and terrible bazaar. “-We better get going then!” It felt wrong. The markets and the figures moving along the sands. It didn’t belong and it shouldn’t have gone unnoticed like it had.</p><p>Not by her or Butch.</p><p>Elmira’s chipper attitude, has her pushing Butch to get back on his bike. “Say hello to Howard for me, would you? He’s simply starved for company! Always, cooped up in that old house of his. It would do him good.” Butch’s terse reply seems to go right over the woman’s head. “Oh sure, we’ll be sure to thank him for dragging us out here! We <strong>love</strong> getting dragged into stupid shit!<strong>”</strong> Angie has no reservation about slapping the back of his head. He’s already on his bike, ducking and pulling her onto the back of it roughly. Angie turns to Elmira to say goodbye, eager to put some distance between them. “If we come across him, we’ll have plenty to talk about.”</p><p>Then The Tunnel Snakes take off further down the road, the temperature dropping by several degrees, as soon as they cross into St. Helens shadow. She’s not sure what compels her to look back, but she can’t fight it. What she sees, tempts her to question her actions. Elmira watches them, unmoving, just on the edge of that unreal bazaar. The longer Evangeline looks, it becomes clear than Elmira does not move from that spot at all.</p><p>She is still there watching and out of focus, even when they are too far ahead into the shadow, to make out her lemon covered dress.</p><hr/><p>The further they went into St. Helens shadow, the colder it became. It was as if the shadow was a perpetual fixture in the region. It was becoming clear, that their unlined leather jackets were just barely going to cut it to keep them warm. The motorcycle rumbles along and all animosity aside, she found herself clinging to Butch tightly. The brightness of the desert was gone, even at the edges of their vision and the sky was darkening significantly.</p><p>He was still her strength, even after all their arguments.</p><p>Butch has remained stoic, uncharacteristically lost in thought or simply planning their escape. The air around them has gotten thicker with an unknown musty scent. All around them, the desert starts looking more and more textured and grey. The mountain barely inching closer, but with every mile they make towards it, the sky seems to disappear behind its oppressive figure.</p><p>The road does not turn and just keeps going and going, becoming asphalt after a while. That’s when they spot it. It’s an inclined slope and the mountainside is directly ahead of them now, like a wall blocking them in. She’s glancing at the time, the two of them coasting along at a steady pace. Butch slows, as they are swallowed up by the mountain on either side, the road ascending up and finally making a left turn.</p><p>Cars and wreckage had been steadily growing in their wake, until they’d reached this place. Now it was a very barren road, which felt as smooth and as desolate as the ocean floor. When a long dark tunnel greets them around the bend, Butch lets them roll to a stop, refusing to ride blindly into it. Turning on the headlights and stalling there with her. She goes to ask him what the holdup is, when he speaks up, calm enough to creep her out. “Every bone in my body’s saying that we’re heading into a trap. Look at that. Tell me I’m wrong.” </p><p>She peers around him and discovers that there’s a roiling dusty fog within the brick tunnel, which even the high beams can’t break through. She’s not rash enough to tell him to push ahead and as much as it irritates her to agree with him right now, he’s not wrong. “This place is really oppressive, but other than the atmosphere, no one’s attacked us since that first creature.” Butch’s cutting the engine and when he turns to look at her, he’s not smiling. He’s matter of fact and defaulting to her judgment, humble, but unhappy. “What do you want to do?”  There’s the maturity, which he hadn’t exhibited in what felt like too long. </p><p>His eyes are sharp enough to catch the grey mold, which is covering the entrance and spreading out on the main road from within. Warning her about it, resolving himself to think like a soldier, fighting his common sense. “That’s the same mold you were talking about right?” Pointing at it, the tunnel is caked with the stuff as if it’s infecting the very earth itself. He turns his eyes to the cloudy grey sky and notices that they’re starting to lose daylight, rationalizing with her, to try to change her mind. “There’s not much sun left either. Judging by the cloud cover, it’s gonna be freezing tonight.” They’re in a valley, with much larger cliffs caging them in, with the only way out, being back the way they came.</p><p>He looks back at her and she’s now pulling her pack out of the saddlebag, searching through it while he watches her. His voice is solid steel, but uneasy at the same time. “You and me, are not breathing that in- not gonna happen. In fact, what I think we should do, is turn back around and set up camp at the flatland we passed up.” He shrugs scoffing down at her. “Not like I could actually have a GOOD idea though, right?” She fishes out a gas mask for herself, unable to give him a kind answer, her tone off handed. “If you want to spend more time here than we have to, be my guest. I’m going to scout ahead with or without you.” It stings his ego, because it just reminds him, that she never needed him as much he’d needed her in the past.</p><p>She’d done just fine on her own, hadn’t she?</p><p>She’s shoving a gas mask at him, looking up at him blankly, and putting her emotions on the back burner, resolved to the task at hand. “Put this on. It’ll keep us from breathing it in. Happy?” His eyes narrow as he takes it, his gun out now with the barrel pointed toward the darkness. He’s saying something, which tempts her heart to ache. “Why do you think I’m here? Because I’m happy about it? Tch…” Without asking, Butch fires into the darkness and an explosion rocks the mountain side. The tunnel ignites brightly before them.</p><p> She’s shoving on her gas mask. Caught totally by surprise by the massive fiery explosion, as the darkness is ignited by orange and red flames. She fears the tunnel may collapse, the whole mountainside being rocked with the force of it. She watches in horror, fearing the walls of it are going to give out and prevent them from ever being able to make it to St. Helens. Then after a cascade of fire, tumbling rocks, and crumbling brick, the fire keeps burning lightly at the mold around the chamber, the foundation settling itself again.</p><p>She shoves him angrily, demanding answers, the sound of her outrage muffled by her mask, until the speaker cracks on, amplifying her voice. “What are you doing?! You could have caved it all in!” He’s shaking her off, barking down at her. “Yeah like my luck would be that good for once!” Clutching his mask tight enough to hurt his knuckles, his voice churns with a flippant explanation. “I wanted to see if it was flammable and whoopity-do! It was! We can see now!” She looks at the mess he made, only to discover, that the high beams are now shining through to the other side of the tunnel. She feels conflicted. </p><p>It was a risky, if not smart idea, but she’s not sure if he’d even receive it if she told him so.</p><p>Inside the tunnel, by some miracle, a single blue convertible, sits rusted and abandoned in the right lane, unaffected by the blast of fire. Its license plate defaced with the words, “Turn Back” etched in red paint across the actual number. It’s the only vehicle for miles around. The message foreboding. She’s not sure what to make of it.</p><p>He’s holstering his gun loosely. Yelling at her caustically, before shoving his own mask on over his head. “Full visibility! You’re welcome!” She doesn’t even get the chance to thank him. He revs the engine and they pass into the smoking, yet illuminated darkness. The walls are now caked with signed, burnt, fungus and the fog is more or less dissipated.</p><p>It’s not the stealthiest approach, since the tunnel amplifies the engine’s roar significantly.</p><p>When they reach the other side, she’s thankful that their skin is mostly covered up. Their masks are Old World Soviet in origin, resembling the Enclave’s power helmets. It’s enough to obscure her vision at the peripheries, leaving her to rely on V.A.T.S. more than she should have to. They’re met with the same oppressive cloud coverage and a whole 50 feet of road, that’s still covered in that ominous fungus. The mountain’s peak is still far, far away but luckily much to her surprise, the fog begins to clear.</p><p>Then there, right up the road, is another fork. The one on the right reading, St. Helens and the other, scratched out and intelligible. Needless to say, they’re heading towards the town and the road is getting wider. The atmosphere lightens a bit, the sands and the town’s colors mimicking the bright fiery orange of the desert before it. They are soon approaching a very large ramshackle arch way, which says, “Welcome, To St. Helens!”</p><p> Finally, after a very long and tense journey, they’ve reached what appears to be actual buildings in the distance.</p><p>It’s enough to have her sagging against Butch’s back in relief. Despite the state of their relationship, it was obvious to them both, that she was still quick to lean on him for moral support. The road seems to pass right through the town and much to her surprise, it’s a flat plateau. It allows them to see most of where they had come from. To the right, the shadow stretches endless across the flatlands, but to the left are many ruined, dilapidated buildings against the towering behemoth of a mountainside.</p><p>The townhouses and varied stores, all appear to have been built right against the side of the mountain. Most of them don’t look like they’ve been occupied for ages. The discovery leaves a sour taste in her mouth. The only buildings to their right, appear to be 2 rather large office buildings at the edge of a sheer drop. They seem a little out of place compared to the style of structures on the left of the road. </p><p>To the left, is a collection of general storefronts and cobbled townhouses, which give off a very rundown, small town feel. Butch stops the bike and she can sense the dissatisfaction dripping off of him. His voice is muffled under his mask, prior to the built in radio in it crackling to life to amplify his voice through its speaker. “Look at this dump...”  She can hear the irritated smugness behind his next statement, long before their coms start working. “Check out all these people! Wow! It’s just crawling with ‘em…friggin’ <b>not</b>.” She’s swinging her leg off the bike and upon inspecting the surrounding area, she deems it safe enough at the moment to take off her mask. </p><p>She tears it off her face, catching her breath, and rolling her eyes at him, her voice breathy. “-We’re checking all the buildings. I know it looks empty ok? I don’t need to hear that from you right now.”</p><p>Butch is tearing his own mask off, holding it loosely in his hand, his hair sticking up oddly now. His expression is grim, but endearment tries to creep into her chest at the cowlicks along his hairline. “This place, that chick!? This whole mountain is giving me the jeepers-creepers! But you’re just peachy, aren’t you?” The two them stand in the late afternoon sunlight, finding it to be brighter here in the town. They’re face to face and looking at each other now and its dead quiet, all except for the wind.</p><p>Her face falls and shaking her head, she scoffs at him. “Why are you being such a chicken?” He clicks his teeth at her, looking away, muttering at her mirthlessly. “Just can’t hack it when I’m right, can you…” Her heart snaps into action, and she’s talking too fast to stop herself from being gentle to him. “You were right ok? This place is abandoned and it’s probably a trap.” The admission, has him turning back to look at her with a neutral expression. Searching her eyes, he’s asking it, without being mean about it. “You’re admitting I’m right? Just that easy, huh?”</p><p>The sky is still now bright blue and the sunlight is brighter on the plateau, than back the way they came. She doesn’t know what to say. A part of her wants to fight back, but it’s not fair to him. He’s allowed to be right about things. She shrugs, answering him without guile or bite. “You’re a smart man… when you want to be. Now is one of those rare occasions.”</p><p>It takes him a moment to register, that she’s said something nice to him. When it does, it warms his heart. He’s clearing his throat and looking away, feeling too shy to look at her when he says it. “I’ve been feeling like an idiot lately so… that’s not a half bad thing to hear coming from you.” She feels the smile tug at her lips, unable to keep from teasing him. “Oh good. I’ve been feeling like you’re an idiot too.” He turns to retaliated, but when he sees her smiling, he can’t hold on to the offense.</p><p>He just grins right back.</p><p>The town is completely devoid of life at first glance. She’s clearing her throat and typing something up on her Pipboy. Not a moment later, his dings with a new message. She’s looking over her shoulder at the plethora of boarded up townhouses, unable to see inside any of them and coming up with a game plan, while he welcomes the distraction. “I’m going to try searching this side of the street. Something's interfering with our long range coms, so it's Pipboy communication only. I doubt there’s anything salvageable across the street, but we could cover more ground if we split up.” He’s leaning forward on his handlebars, spotting little details in the buildings and on the road which make him uneasy, cementing his doubts.</p><p>There are symbols and carvings along some of the wooden doorways. He notes the lack of animals or even birds over head. The wind blows a chill into his bones, ominous. He doesn’t see tracks or foot prints. He’s sagging forward and shaking his head.</p><p>His is genuinely creeped out, speaking up about it in a way which she might listen to. “No tracks, or birds, or any signs of life. And you want to split up?”</p><p>He gives her a pointed look, concerned, trying to keep his voice steady. “Doesn’t it seem funny to you, that there’s nothing alive around here?” She nods, looking at the long strip of townhouses, which break off into a string of darkened and beat up wooden shops. She’s looking at her Pipboy, checking her RAD counter and getting nothing. She’s not going to argue with him and she values him as a partner, so she answers him respectfully. “It does. My Giger Counter’s quiet though. Be ready. If anything, these houses are pretty large. The settlers could be holed up in one of them.”</p><p>They’re stopped at the steps of one the identical houses, so she takes it upon herself to try the front door. Butch watches her, with his hand on his gun. He’d be damned if she got killed, because of a stupid mistake on his part. He’d never forgive himself, especially with the way things were between them now. He’s questioning if he has the right to have turned their comfortable relationship into something so unjustifiably scary, when here they were staring real danger right in the face.</p><p>The red, rusty door creaks open with a loud moaning protest.</p><p>What lays beyond it is odd as well as disconcerting. Butch comments on it, reluctantly taking his hand off his gun, his thoughts on her and his inability to accept the way he had been acting. “Think they were trying to keep someone out…”She tilts her head to the side, noticing the odd barbaric runes etched into this doorframe for herself. Behind the door, rests a solid brick wall. Butch’s observations are astute as ever. “…or something <b>in</b>?”  She’s looking to the side of the door at the outer wall.</p><p>Each practically identical door is centered between 2 very dark and dusty windows. </p><p>The houses each have raised brick foundations and a pair of concrete steps in the center of their front walls. Each with 2 large bay windows over a long dirt patch, which might have once been a foot garden along what was left of the sidewalk. Now only raw dirt and decaying, burnt bushes remained. She rushes down the steps, searching around the house for a rock amongst the assorted rubble. She plucks a large one up with her hand and swiftly tosses it at the right window.</p><p>Either she’s lost her touch or that is VERY strong glass, because it doesn’t even crack it. Butch clicks his teeth, un-holsters his gun and opts to shoot first, think later. The gunshot startles the daylights out of her, forcing her to jump back, as the sound echoes against the craggy mountainside. She turns on him, expecting him to be grinning at her expense. His grim, unnerved expression, has her backpedaling, looking back to the window where he has fixed his gaze.</p><p>The glass is crumbling into the dead bushes and much to her horror, black dust is pouring from its broken surface in heap-fulls. She feels Butch’s hand yanking her back to him, his first instinct being to shove his own mask over her face, leaving him without one. She’s attempting to catch her bearings, but he’s hopping off his bike like greased lightening with her wrist in his grasp and knocking it over in the process. Covering his nose and mouth with his arm, he’s tugging her away from the growing cloud of newly disturbed spores in a mad dash. She’s looking back, the two of them now safely across the street. </p><p>They’re now watching helplessly as the dark cloud appears to rise far up into the air. It looks alive and deadly in some uncanny way. A miasma of foul infection. It is rising higher and dripping from the jagged broken window like drops of sand. It had been sitting in that house for a very long time most likely and now it was finally free.</p><p>It soon follows them across the street at a snail’s pace.</p><p>The ink black ooze, consuming Butch’s motorcycle in its smoky depths. They stand there for a moment, safely away from it. Then Angie’s pulling the mask off her face angrily and shoving it into Butch’s chest, livid. “Why do you just shoot at shit without thinking about it?!” Butch’s head looks from the death house, back to her, adrenaline fueling his words, his face white. “I thought you were done for!” He was still reckless and pigheaded, prompting her to reprimand him for it. “Don’t you ever THINK?”</p><p>He’s watching the swirling black cloud, relief washing over him, when it stops spreading into the street. He looks down at her fuming face, but is overcome with one horrible thought. <em> ‘I could have killed you…I could have lost you.’ </em>He’s grabbing her by her shoulders, yelling at her angrily, full of genuine terror. “I didn’t even want to come here with you!” Her eyes are ice cold again, her voice loud and unafraid. “Then why did you?!” His eyes lock onto the wind, as it begins to blow the smoke away, the spores dispersing and becoming thinner and thinner.</p><p>It begins to disappear, like a cowardly vapor.</p><p>He speaks his mind before having the heart to devise a lie or try to hide it. “<b>Like I’m just going to let you come to a place like this alone</b>?!” She turns away from him, letting his words settle, when he tacks something on as an afterthought. “Not on MY bike you’re not!” Through it all, Butch was loyal. </p><p>Even when he didn’t want to be.</p><p>She slides out of his hands, rolling her shoulders and waving at the now cleared death fog. “Oh, of course, it’s just all about your dumb toy. If you want to get rid of me, it’s not that hard, Butch. Just learn how to leave and you’d be free.” He’s still worked up and looking at the darkening sky, hating every moment of fading sunlight. He apologizes, guilt now weighing heavily on him. “My god, I wasn’t thinking about my hog, Angie! You’re the one over here with me on this side of the street, aren’t you? …I was too trigger happy ok? I admit it. I’d…I don’t know what I’d do if I...if you…” She’s shaking her head at him, unable to fully blame him, acknowledging the on edge greaser with a tired frown. “-I know that alright? You just pissed me off! I’m still here... It’s alright Butch, you couldn’t have known… at least we know why the houses are all bricked up.” She’s sighing and looking up at him, aware of the intensely soft look he’s got to him now. Handsome as ever.</p><p>She’s walking over to the fallen motorcycle, securing her mask on. Butch’s mask…which he’d given to her without a second thought. When she reaches the bike, she picks it up and rolls it over to Butch, handing it off to him, along with the other mask in her backpack. They both decide to mutually keep them on, for as long as they are here for. She types up a message on her Pipboy, the words flowing freely, showing up on his Pipboy swiftly.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: Keep your ears open. I’m going to look around some more.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: I still care about you.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: So be careful and don’t go silent or I’ll think you’re dead.</p><p>Butch’s mask hides whatever expression he’s got to him now, but his posture hints at being both battle ready and tense. She’s already walking off, as he types out a reply: <em> Please forgive me. </em></p><p>KING-SN3K: …</p><p>He deletes it, unable to send it. Watching her back as she proceeds to open up another door on her own. That one also has a wall behind it and as she goes further up the road, it becomes clear that most of the Townhouses have been barricaded. Whatever fate befell this town, it was obviously some kind of plague. He has time to think back to what she had said at their last campsite. </p><p>That he should stop blaming her for his own issues. He agreed with her. He was remembering how it had felt to hold her, missing it. He hadn’t been afraid to talk to her before. Now wasn’t the time to come clean about everything he had been feeling however.</p><p>Rejection hurt worse, now that his heart was so deeply involved. Losing her meant more than just a bullet to her head now. It meant being left behind by her. Forced to watch her back during life or death fights and unable to keep her happy in the small ways. Could he ever make her happy?</p><p>He types to her, managing to hit send.</p><p>KING-SN3K: got it</p><p>KING-SN3K:  ima check out the office buildings</p><p>After a long, painful pause, he tacks on a final note, before heading off to find a safe spot to park his bike.</p><p>KING-SN3K:  There is something really wrong with this town.</p><hr/><p>It’s been more than a few minutes since they went their separate ways. It’s now going on an hour and so far, all of the townhouses are bricked up. When she gets to the boarded up stores, there are 5 of them all in a row. All of them made of wood, looking like an old western movie set. She’s walking along the boards, a long wooden canopy connected over her head, offering her cover from rain or sun.</p><p>The first shop has the name C. Thula’s Apothecary in faded gold leaf on the battered window display. At first glance into the display, she sees empty green, blue and red bottles of what she can guess are strange chems on a spinning tray. Her gun is out and the window is covered in a thick layering of dust at its corners. The door to the apothecary is made of rotted wood, its brown decaying complexion, matching the rest of the splintering wood around her. She reaches for the rusted handle, nudging the door open with the barrel of her shotgun.</p><p>A bell rings as the door knocks it lightly, its hinges creaking at her obstinately. Peering inside, there are dark shadows all over the dusty store. The isles resembling a gas station’s and a back room hiding from her sight, with a single flickering bare bulb lit at the entryway into that rickety wooden room. She takes a step inside, inhaling a deep breath through her mask, checking her Pipboy for red dots ahead. Nothing.</p><p>She steps inside, but notices, that the runes, the odd carvings are not etched into this doorframe as they had been on the townhouses. Whether it was folk art or not, there was something plainly wrong about it. She was not a superstitious woman, so she crept onward ever still, hoping to find one good reason to be there. She steps over fallen bottles, with peeling labels. Sleeping Sap, Marrow Root, Adder’s Cure, and other strange concoctions, the like of which she’s never seen.</p><p>The door left wide open behind her, she’s creeping further in. The sun is shooting beams of light through the dusty air, peeking through the boarded up windows all around the little storefront. It is dark inside. So dark that even the fading light of day feels too bright here. She knocks a stray bottle away with her boot, the glass rolling along the wood with a forlorn mumble.</p><p>It was silent, save for the inopportune gusts of howling wind, making the walls groan in protest. A terrible memory and Elmira’s voice, seems to prickle at the back of her mind alongside that yawning breeze. <em> “Our town has stood for centuries.” </em>Some terrible crooning sound, which leaves her hair standing on end, leaves the very walls shaking around her. It was just old wood and innocuously shifting earth. Nothing more.</p><p>She couldn’t explain it, but something was wrong. Aside from the toxic spores and the scientific anomaly that had stumbled its way toward them earlier, she had deep seeded dread. She takes another step, the door at her back feeling very far away. The bulb in front of her, flickers and cracks, moving precariously in the wind. Its wire hung from the wooden ceiling carelessly, a lonely, ugly sort of thing.</p><p>BANG!</p><p>In a violent whirl, the door slams shut behind her. Shotgun aimed at the way she’d come from, she jumps like a wild animal. Startled, but not so much as to drop her guard. Her ears strain and her eyes flicker towards her Pipboy. Red dot. </p><p>She’s rationalizing with herself. </p><p>She’s been in worse places. She’s seen much more haunted looking structures than this. She reassures herself. The white light spikes and she thinks her eyes are fooling her, the way the shadows seem to dance on the walls like flames. A great looming shadow, spreads out behind her curling around the door before her, its grasping fingers like wicked vines and hot like an evil eye on the back of her neck. </p><p>She whirls her shotgun around, her heart hammering beneath her ribcage. She doesn’t know what to expect to find here. A ghoul, or a bloodbug? Something explainable. Though, when her eyes lock onto the shattered bulb and nothing else in the room with her, its worse than if there had been something for her to shoot.</p><p>She looks at her Pipboy and the red dot seems to flicker out of existence. The wind howls at the wood, as if to warn her of some ill omen. She’s swallowing thickly, her thoughts ablaze with the need to comprehend. <em> ‘It’s a glitch or a power surge… nothing to fight and no danger. Relax.’ </em>She holds her gun tightly, lowering it reluctantly. She turns on her Pipboy’s light, comforted by the sea of green.</p><p>She walks to where the bulb shattered, refusing to be jumping at shadows. She steels her heart, peeking around the corner. No ghouls or even old bones. There’s only a bulletin board and few news clippings, hanging over a decrepit metal desk. Curious, as she ever was, she approaches the newspaper clippings, drawn in by the faded print.</p><p>There’s a picture of a man, with dark and fathomless eyes, shaking the hand of another portly balding gentleman. The headline reads “Vault-Tec’s 6th Fallout Shelter Finally Completed!” and it only leaves her with more of a rock in her gut. PING! Her Pipboy goes off like a sharp knife to her ears, making her jump a whole foot in the air. She checks it angrily, finding that Butch has written her a new message.</p><p>KING-SN3K: The name “Dunwich Borers” mean anything to you?</p><p>Her chest tightens. If there was one building, that she’d never been able to wrap her mind around, it was The Dunwich Building. She’d fought her way through by the skin of her teeth, hallucinations, and madness were at the edge of her mind like an asylum patient’s plight at every turn. And in the bowels of that place, stood some terrible and dark monolith, which she had been more than happy to forget. She’s typing a reply, with a shaking finger.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: Get out of that building. Right now.</p><p>She’s not sure if Butch is facing something terrible at the moment. But she’d rather him not have to face any place with the name “Dunwich” attached to it. She’s turning back to the door, walking across the apothecary swiftly. And in that moment, she feels the creeping sensation of a watchful eye. She turns to look back.</p><p>There’s nothing.</p><p>With a jitter in her steps, she makes her way to the door. The tinging bell bids her farewell. She’s on to the next store, ready to make this search quick and efficient. Between Thula’s and the next store front is an alley way. She glances down it, finding it to be empty except for a red rusted dumpster. </p><p>She notes that it would be easy for a hostile being to attack her by surprise from between the gaps in the store fronts.</p><p>Across the alley at the back of it, she sees the blackened rocks of the mountainside. If she stares for too long, the shadows seem to dance in front of her eyes like flames again. She’s coming up on the next store front. A wooden sign, hangs from the ceiling above her, drawing here eye farther up to the cobwebs and spider eggs, which are numerous and thick amongst the splintered beams. She looks into the display.</p><p>Fishing poles and an oversized swordfish make up the showcase in the first and only window. Poe’s Bait ‘n Tackle or so the door says in black paint above the ramshackle wooden door. She opens the door and is hit in the face with the smell of rotten fish. She immediately barrels back and chokes on it.</p><p>She shouldn’t be able to smell ANYTHING right now. Dropping her weapon, coughing at the putrid smell, she feels blindly at the straps on her mask and checks for anything abnormal along the filters edges. Fearing the worst, she wonders if she’d been breathing in anything deadly without her knowledge. She turns to her Pipboy and her fingers are scrambling to check her own vitals. Much to her relief, everything looks fine.</p><p>She’s looking around, this terrible itch of being surrounded hitting her right in her lizard brain. There’s nothing up or down the street, not even the sight of Butch in the Offices behind her. The mask feels fine and air tight, allowing only filtered air through. Then she hears it clear as day. The ticking of her Giger Counter.</p><p>Flipping through the screens, she sees her RAD meter steadily climbing. It’s radiation heavy in Poe’s. She’s reaching into one of her jacket pockets, pulling out a syringe of liquid form RAD-X. She rolls up her sleeve and injects herself. She catches her breath, as the meter slows and comes to a stop.</p><p>She’s reaching out to Butch over their message boards, unsure of herself.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: I think that something might have gotten through my mask.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: Make sure yours is secure.</p><p>She expects him to wait before answering, but it’s immediate and tempts her to feel warm inside.</p><p>KING-SN3K: What? What’s that mean? Are you ok? </p><p>KING-SN3K: You alive? What can I do about it?</p><p>KING-SN3K: Where are ya? What’s wrong?</p><p>KING-SN3K: Damn it, Angie! I knew I should have stuck with you!</p><p>She’s taking a deep breath and much to her relief, the smell is gone and her lungs feel clear. Looking back at the now swinging door behind her, she takes out another syringe. Stimpacking herself, for good measure, even though every box on her Pipboy checks out alright. It was odd, but nothing infectious should have been able to eat through these masks. Her Pipboy told her that nothing had.</p><p>She answers her partner back with as much information as she can.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: False alarm. Everything’s all good.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: I’m at the Bait Shop.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: It smelled like 200 year old dead fish, but my vitals are all good.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: Don’t worry about me. Just get out of those offices and help search down my side of the street.</p><p>Reluctantly she turns back to the door, taking up her shotgun. She sees bones and fish heads strung up on the roof and hanging from the rafters. The breeze blows them to sway on their fishing lines and they rattle like they know she’s looking at them. She approaches the front door again, bracing herself for the smell. She shoves open the door, fearing the implication of the foul and horrific odor, awaiting her.</p><p>She peers inside, waiting. Much to her disconcertment, the smell has vanished. A trick of the mind or perhaps of the radiation. Her senses are the only thing that have kept her alive this far. Without them, she was beginning to doubt herself.</p><p>She steps over the threshold and the layout is almost identical to the last store. Even the backroom- she freezes at the center of the aisles. Whatever fate had befallen this town, she was beginning to wish that she’d arrived sooner. The back wall consisted of freezers and glass display, which might have once displayed bait. This place looked like a typical raider’s wet dream.</p><p>Strange malformed meat is smeared all over the white and broken glass doors of the old storage freezers. The sound of hundreds of flies, meets her at the back wall and where a naked bulb might have once hung, a large black wall of fuzzy mold, is blocking up the back room’s entryway, overflowing from it. The backroom is covered in hills of black fuzz and grey mushrooms appear to be sprouting from whatever meat is laying around on the floor. It should be frightening and the sight terrible. Instead, relief fills her and her battle senses tingle.</p><p>This felt familiar. Like a typical sight in the Wasteland she called home. It fuels her to put her paranoia aside. Perusing the area, there’s nothing of note and no red dots in sight. She walks out of the disgusting shop and leaves, finding no signs of life inside of it.</p><p>Butch has reached out to her again, his screenname flashing at her comfortingly.  </p><p>KING-SN3K: Deedman’s Grocer.</p><p>She doesn’t recognize the name, but that’s all he gives her. She’s walking farther along the wooden boards, ever followed by that perpetual creaking under her black hiking boots. She’s at the next building. Boarded up windows and a green mossy door. No name or sign to be seen.</p><p>She tries to move on, but pauses at the door. Unable to help herself she puts her ear to the door and hears the unmistakable noise of scratching behind it. She tries the green door’s metal knob and finds it to be locked. As if aware of its new audience, the scratching ceases and she’s torn between moving on or trying to pick the lock. She’s glancing farther up the way, looking for Butch’s frame.</p><p>An old man is standing at the end of the boards.</p><p>It’s unbelievable at first. Enough to have her staring slack jawed, as if her eyes are now deceiving her more than ever before. She finally has the wits to call out to him, the grey, stringy hair of aged humanity, peeking out from under the stranger’s straw hat. “Hello? Sir!” He doesn’t seem to acknowledge her, his portly frame visible from 2 stores down. Her mask is thick enough to muffle her voice, but not enough to where she couldn’t be heard.</p><p>She abandons the mossy green door and as if the building knew that she’d abandoned it, the scratching faintly starts once more, catching on the wind behind her. She’s walking swiftly towards the stranger, having to look down every alleyway between each of the stores for peace of mind. Each one is empty, save for the occasional dumpster or rock pile. The man turns around, sluggishly, but still doesn’t acknowledge her. She’s now running past the last store between them, her legs now carrying her into a full on sprint.</p><p>There’s this notion at the back of her mind that the man will vanish too. Just like the smell. Just like the spore monster. If she doesn’t reach him now, she’ll never know where the townspeople went. She turns to check the final alley, unfaltering in her now mad dash pace.</p><p>A mangled grotesque sight sits before her eyes, which her mind fervently rejects. Her prickling ears and stuttering heart get twisted up on a wailing shriek, which crescendos out of the alleyway like some daemonic apparition. She skids to a halt, unable to accept what she’d just seen and heard. Again, she hears the wailing, scratching caterwauling. She turns to go back, stopping just at the alley’s edge.</p><p>She’s taking a minute, desperately trying to comprehend what she’d just seen. <em> ‘It was the shadows on the rocks. It was a pile of corpses. It was another spore beast.’ </em>All of these explanations were very good, but none of them fit with the glimpse she’d had around the corner. She acts, the barrel of her shotgun scraping against the wood, as she prepares for whatever abomination awaits her bullets. What greets her is worse, than if she’d had been gazing into the very void itself. It was empty, as if whatever had flashed within her periphery, could only live there.</p><p>A figment, which could only been seen in the midst of a run. Something, that she’d dreamed up and now questioned her own sanity about. MROW! She skitters and jumps to the side, truly and unnaturally frightened. She’s now staring down at an animal, which is both very real and sickly.</p><p>An alley cat. Black and wiry, ghoulified, missing a whole chuck of its side, it’s open ribcage on full display. It looks up at her with the eyes of a Glowing-One, as if it is carrying some ancient secret behind its sullen gaze. Hysterical, she laughs.</p><p>A bark of a sound, as the harmless creature lets out another scratchy, painful cry. Her thoughts are racing. <em> ‘Am I finally going crazy out here?’ </em>She knew what fear could do to a person. She’d thought that she had become immune to its dangers. She hated to accept it, but she knew that Butch had been right.</p><p>There was something really, really wrong with this whole place.</p><p>The pathetic creature winds around her legs, but she’s not in the mood to pet it. Instead, she’s walking toward where the Old Man had been. She comes upon the end of the boards and much to her irony, she sees the sign above the door in all its faded glory. Deedman’s Grocer. The windows are all tinted black, but there’s a few broken pieces in the glass.</p><p>At least Butch was waiting for her inside.</p><p>Before she makes the final plunge to enter, her eyes catch a mural painting on the side of the building next to it. It depicts hooded figures in red robes and a hand floating above them, with an eye at the center of it. Mythos Book Emporium, crowns the picture with a mystical sort of allure to it. Were she not in a hurry, she’d have been dying to check it out. As it was, she didn’t have the time, and the recent scare, had left her with little desire to stay in this place for much longer.</p><p>So, with firm affirmation, she takes the final steps towards Deedman’s. </p><p>She’s now standing at a rusty wooden door, breaking one of her cardinal rules about entering an unknown place. She gives herself away, calling inside. “Butch?” The grocery store is little more than a snack shop and about as well-lit as Thula’s had been. She checks her Pipboy and is relieved about her findings. A green dot, to her south west, right ahead.</p><p>She wonders about the disappearance of the old man, long enough to spot him inside. The store is very small and this old, old man sits in a rocking chair behind the counter, dressed in a blue mechanic’s uniform. He’s definitely the only green dot and Butch is nowhere to be found. She’s looking down at her Pipboy to check her messages again, only to find no trace of the message which had lured her here. Her skin is crawling at her own lapse of sanity and the malevolent implication of reading a message that didn’t seem to exist outside of her imagination.</p><p>The man’s not wearing a mask. That does little to encourage her to remove her own and everything to leave her concerned for the stranger's safety. The scrawny cat walks through her legs and hops onto the wooden counter. It had been silent like a vapor and yet, there the black creature now sat. It calls to her bleakly with it's mournful yowl, before turning it's eyes away, as if pearing into a distant and unseeable beyond. </p><p>A register sits open and empty beside it. She lets the door close behind her, addressing the man, out of breath. “Hello! Could you not hear me calling out to you?” The man’s eyes are glassy, far away and his answer reveals his state of mind. “…Have you come for the meeting in town hall?” She swallows thickly, the cat now grooming itself atop the counter, oblivious to its half alive plight. Her voice is steadier than she feels. “I just arrived here with my partner. I’m looking for…”</p><p>She’s not sure anymore. The old man is silent, his rocking chair creaking back and forth, as she approaches him a bit closer, gathering her words. “-Where is everyone? Are you the only one here?” Like a broken record, he’s spouting something she’s heard before. “Oh! We’s a quiet town! Just about 25 of us, yes’um! You here for the meeting, darlin’?” She looks behind her, at where the barren town rests behind the store’s walls and then back at the man. His face is covered in moles and bumps, wrinkled and sagging, his eyes glassy and blue.</p><p>She’s shaking her head, coming to the conclusion, that the man is harmless. She plays along, polite in her wording. “I…Well, goodness, I didn’t know there was a…a meeting today.” She clears her throat, trying to give him a medical assessment without giving herself away. “Can you tell me what day it is, mister…” She’s checking for a name tag, reading “Bill” on the patch of his uniform. “…Mr. Bill?” Whether the man can understand her or not, remains to be seen, as his reply is very off topic. “Martha’s my wife! She’s at the meeting too! Everyone’s there! And they’re all singing and dancing!” He’s staring off, as if caught in a dream and she’s getting the notion, that there’s not much she can do for him.</p><p>She’s reaching into her pocket, pulling out the letter again. Showing it to the man, as a last ditch effort to make him understand. “Were you the one who sent this?” His glassy eyes flicker slowly in a gawking stutter to the paper. He looks at it, with a smile spreading and cracking across his lips, sweet and senile. “That’s a nice book you got there!” She shakes her head, trying again. “No…no this is a letter. Do you know who wrote this letter?”</p><p>The man meets her eyes for the first time and she can’t explain it, but it makes her want to cry. She’s not soft. She’s not stupid. But there is something so despairing and vacant in those eyes. He replies in the same mindless manner as before. “…Martha’s at the meeting. Boy, oh boy! Can’t wait till she’s home!”</p><p>The cat meows, as if to get her attention. She looks and finds it stretching lazily atop what looks to be an ancient pamphlet. It has the picture of a very large mansion on it. On its cover are noble ladies and distinguished gentlemen dancing in what looks like a garden party from an Old World novel. It reads, “Town Hall to meet in accordance with the new Vault Registry!” She feels the burden of this trip weigh on her shoulders heavily.    </p><p>She’s addressing him softly, like she might do with a frightened child. “Bill… Can you point me in the direction of the Town Hall? I don’t want to be late for the meeting.” Those are the magic words it seems. The man’s smile neither shrinks or grows and remains cemented to his face. He gets up and his whole body shakes like a gelatinous bowl of jelly, as he makes his way around the counter, shuffling through papers and garbage in his way. He walks right out the front door and she follows, the cat left to sun itself on the counter.</p><p>They stand looking out at the empty space of the plateau, which leads to a straight drop off the cliff’s side. She’s not sure what she’s expecting, but when Bill raises his finger and points to the empty flat rock ahead of them, her hopes sink. His voice is just as cheery as it ever was. “Well, you must have poor eyesight! It’s right over there!” She looks at him, a pitying look hidden beneath her mask. Bill’s lowering his hand, talking about something which sounds like a lovely dream. “It’s so loud over there too! They got the chapterhouse to play in the band! They’re all just dancing right now in the grass…and Martha’s waving now! Smile, Wanderer!”</p><p>She doesn’t, not that he can tell. When Old Bill turns to go back inside, she’s stopping him with a firm hand on his shoulder. “Hold on there, Bill!” She’s remembering another horribly cheery smile, a lemon covered dress, and the only lead she’s gotten so far. She searches the other side of the street, but the only buildings were the one’s Butch was supposed to have been searching inside of. That’s when the giant billboard, meets her traveling eyes.</p><p>“Dunwich Borers and Vault-Tec, Welcome you!” The Vault Boy is shaking hands with a dark haired shadow of a mascot and her spirits are suddenly rising. That was the face of an enemy she knew very well and she would prefer a known enemy, over making an enemy of her own mind. She’s focused on Bill again, determination in her voice. “Do you know where Howard lives? Howard invited us to stay at his house, while we’re here.” Bill’s eyes light up with clarity, but only for a moment. The man starts walking briskly along the boards and she falls behind the man, turning her head sharply to check the alleyway.</p><p>Nothing is there.</p><hr/><p>He’s crawling out of the rubble of this building complex, barely anything left of the walls in the first one. She’d told him to get out of this place, but something had pushed him to explore the next property over. Its walls were mostly intact and when he stepped inside, it was a very dark, very empty warehouse. All except for the foreman’s office, which had held an ass load of information and a dimly lit terminal. He’d come across the company name and figured out that Vault-Tec had, had a part in whatever this town had been.</p><p>Inside the desk, he’d uncovered a variety of strange books, written in either Latin or French. He only recognized the languages because he was interested in fairy tales as a kid. The library in 101 was really boring, unless you went into the restricted sections of it. Even then, he’d told no one. There was only one Bookworm that should be made into a laughingstock as far as he’d been concerned back then.</p><p>Needless to say, he could at least tell what languages some of the books might have been written in. Even if he couldn’t read it himself and there wasn’t a lick of English or Italian amongst them. He bags up a few, still yet to have run into any one alive and sour about it. He takes it upon himself to hack into the terminal on the desk and begins to read a bit. The first entry says: “I Don’t Think We’re Going To Have Enough Insulation, Fred”</p><p>He’s sitting on a backless rolling stool and learning about Vault-Tec’s reason for being here. Apparently, the emails and entries all documented the construction of a Vault underneath the town. Many of them were worried about having enough supplies to finish it. The theme of them all was about the dangers of radiation leaking into the vault on a daily basis. From the last entry’s title, “Eric has been dealt with” it seemed like that was the whole point.</p><p>Vault 6 was another experiment gone wrong. Here he was sitting right on top of it apparently. He’s checking his Pipboy for a message from her. Radio silence. He feels his shoulders sag.</p><p>From the moment they got here, he couldn’t shake the feeling that this place was just wrong somehow. Sure, he was pretty paranoid and yeah, an honest coward at the start of his King Snake career, but this was more than that. He trusted his eyes, his ears, and his trigger finger. There was another time he’d felt this kind of uneasy suspicion and that was in a little horror show, he called Vault 106. It was like the ground was sucking the life out of him or something.</p><p>He wasn’t a religious guy, but as he got up from the terminal and the chair went rolling behind him, he felt like dousing himself in holy water. He’s making to walk out of the side door, catching grey fungus writhing up from the dirt, in the farthest corner of the room. He walks a little faster, his hand up and already eager to get out of the place. BAM! His cheek connects with the steel and his heart flutters.</p><p>Muttering out loud to himself, jiggling the handle again. “The hell?” He’d come in from this door. It was unlocked before. He gets on his knees to pick the lock when a crash of static, has him shooting up onto his feet. He’s searching the room wildly, the shelves stocked sparsely with motor oil, tin cans, and old tools.</p><p>The wall separating the foreman’s room from the warehouse floor is a collection of broken glass and dusty windows. He looks at the open doorway on his left, which leads further into the warehouse floor, searching like a scared rat for the source of the static. He’s stumbling back and reaching for his weapon, getting it out and aimed ahead of himself in a flash. There are windows all around the upper deck of the warehouse’s steel walls, allowing the last vestiges of sunlight into the otherwise pitch black building. The static is echoing off the walls and is difficult to- ah ha!</p><p>A radio, hiding behind the trashcan, right beside the desk he’d just been sitting at. He laughs a little, his skin clammy, broken out into a cold sweat. It’s so cold in this place he can see his breath. He’s walking up to the fallen radio, picking it up out of the garbage still holding onto his .44 with the other. He spies a cord trailing out of the back of the contraption.</p><p>He places his gun on the desk, turning the dial and failing to shut it off or find a station. He figures he’ll just unplug the thing, searching for where the chord ends. The static is quieter, but as he follows the chord and pulls at it, his skin crawls at his discovery. The plug has been frayed right off. His thoughts fixate on it briefly. <em> ‘Why is this thing on?’ </em>As if the object tasted his doubt, that god awful static bursts out of it loud and violent, alongside a man’s garbled and wretched scream.</p><p>It causes him to drop the thing, the screaming giving way to the start of a song. <em> “The GILA monster!” </em> It is impossibly loud and all Butch can do is stand there and stare at it momentarily. That wasn’t a wireless radio and as far as he could tell, it wasn’t running on a battery. He’s running for his gun and kicking the thing across the room, the lyrics of the song deafening. <em> “The Gila monsta’ hopping and a’ pawin’ the ground! Cranin’ his head! Lookin’ all around!” </em> Butch’s eyes look out into the darkness of the warehouse and there in the fading light, the ground looks like it’s crawling with grey moldering shapes.</p><p>Some of them are rising up, having the uncanny resemblance of doubled-up human figures, though nothing about them was comparable. He’d be tempted to rub his eyes if he could, because it was as if they were playing tricks on him. A sulfuric gas cloud was now dancing above the floor and shuffling about like a phantoms' at a sock hop. A phosphorescent glow, is giving the shapes malformed eyes or fingers or odd outlines. Blue like willow-wisps and disfigured like ghouls.</p><p>It was as if the warehouse floor had become hell’s dancehall.</p><p>He takes a deep breath, expecting to taste the mold in the air. His mask has to be doing its job. It’s got to be. His Pipboy’s ticking on him and he doesn’t have to think twice, before popping the cap off some RAD-X and sticking himself with it. It was times like these, when he was glad that he didn’t need to pop the pills to get the results. Behind him, the tool cabinet that was so unassuming before bedside the door, begins to shake like its alive or possessed and Butch is left to make a choice.</p><p>Fight whatever comes out or try to get out. Fight or flight. The song rattles in his skull, his gun steady in his hands. <em> “Got a little closer so I could see- I hope that monsta’ ain’t lookin’ for me!” </em> In his frantic debate he watches the terminal come back on, unable to peel his eyes away from the screen, a garble of either inane gibberish or some terribly absurd language, which he immediately never has the desire to learn. He’s yelling at the cabinet, refusing to be defenseless, in the face of this jarring situation. “That’s it! Keep it up! I got a bullet for you, either way Ghost Man!”</p><p>Now if it had all continued to scream at him, the radio and the very walls, along with the cabinet? Well that would have been alright by him. No. What answered him, was as if this unnamed force truly WAS answering him back. The radio cuts off along with the terminal.</p><p>The shaking stops. It all just goes dead. Soon the only sound left, is the fleshy, wormy sounds coming up from the warehouse floor. Like maggots in the grave, the sound digs into his brain like they're <em>inside</em> of him. It leaves him to drive one very firm belief into his battered ability to be brave.</p><p>He doesn’t believe in ghosts.</p><p>He does believe that something is here. It’s got it out for him. It has him covered in goosebumps and staring at the door again, shifty eyed. The silence is deafening and gives him too much time to add to the terrified mantra in his head. <em> ‘Crap, crap, crap, oh crap..’ </em>With confidence he doesn’t really feel, he challenges the presence and the mold and anything that could possibly be there with him. “HA! That’s right! Not so tough now, are you?”</p><p>His taunt goes unanswered, his mask fogging up with the heat of his labored breathing. Just when he turns to make way for the door again, like a spider attempting to draw in a fly, he hears it behind him. An electric <strong>voom</strong>. Like an old television. The terminal has turned itself on again.</p><p>It’s bright green glow is sinister and unable <b>not</b> to peek his curiosity. He’s inching closer to the desk. He's turned his gaze to the murky glass and watching as letters and numbers scroll rapidly up its screen. It reminds him of the encryption locks he’s so used to breaking.</p><p>A very short story begins to type itself up. It is operating without any input from him at all. Letters and numbers and letters and numbers. Letters and <strong>hellfire.</strong> He just can’t look away from it:</p><p>
  <b>“There was once a town of 25. They dwelled beneath the mount. There they stay and soon decay. Never, ever to find their way out.”</b>
</p><p>The story, the omen, the letters fill him with despair, vanishing as soon as they are read. His gun held limply in his hand, the corners of his vision, are now trying to reveal creatures beyond his mortal comprehension. It's with a craven heart, that he ponders the existence of ghosts or higher powers, doubting himself. Locked in a staring match with that palid screen, his legs forget how to work. That’s when over and over again, only 3 intelligible words begin to repeat themselves.</p><p>Over and over again, as if dancing from the screen and floating off of it, the mishapen form of them grasping for his very being:<br/><br/></p><p>“Stay and decay, stay and decay, stay and decay-“</p><p>Entranced, he is barely able to lift his hand. Caught in what is inherently evil without a logical reason to be so. Unexaplanible. The kind of evil that just is. He didn’t run on nothing but logic though so at least there was that.</p><p>He can hardly raise his hand, but he still brings his gun up high enough to fire it. He can't even figure out how to piece thoughts together again. He's lucky that doesn’t have to think about it, before pulling the trigger. It's just his raw instinct to do so- as his body is fighting to survive without him having the mind to tell it to. The screen shatters into a fountain of fiberglass and circuits.</p><p>Then like waking up from a nightmare, he’s racing for the door.</p><p>Not bothering to try it, he shoots off the door’s hinges, greeted by the early hours of dusk. He’s tripping over his own feet to get out. His hands are shaking and it feels like something unholy has gotten into his head. He was hallucinating and that alone was definitely a good enough reason for him to agitate the gravel. He’s reaching for his Pipboy, typing to the one person, who he trusts to be his rock.</p><p>KING-SN3K: mask’s not workin for me</p><p>KING-SN3K: seeing shit</p><p>KING-SN3K: where r u</p><p>Simple and to the point. He’s on his knees now in the dirt. He takes inventory of himself and a curse falls form his lips. “Awe, fuck!” He forgot the books and his bag of salvage inside. He’s looking over his shoulder, expecting to see back into that terrible structure and to catch sight of the shattered glass he'd left behind him.</p><p>But that’s not what he sees. He’s not sure that he even understands what he sees. The door’s still there. He gets back to his feet and tries the handle. To his shock, it's unlocked.</p><p>The door flies open, it's hinges still intact. Even as he stares at it, his hands trembling, he still can't understand. He looks back into the building and sees nothing, but solid brick. It was as if he had never been inside to begin with. If ever there was a time for an evil laugh to scratch at the back of his head, it would have been then.</p><p>It feels like it well and truly is laughing at him, the very ground he’s sitting on.</p><p>His voice is hoarse, low and deadly. “Screw this noise- this town’s cursed!” He’s backing away, just stuck staring at the bricks. Stuck here in the devil’s vacation spot. It was becoming more and more obvious to him, that there was only 1 person in this town who he had to save. His Pipboy lights up. </p><p>LONE-ang3l: Stay and Decay</p><p>There in bold green letters he swore he saw it plain as day.</p><p>He has to jerk his arm out of sight after looking at it. Disgust and fear, worming around in his guts, he has no way to explain any of this away. His breath cuts off in a choked kind of gasp. He turns his eyes to the sky. He’s knocked silly, his legs shaking and itching to run.</p><p>He fires down another look at her reply, his body drained of its strength, re-reading it carefully.</p><p>LONE-ang3l: I’ve found us a place to stay, what’s taking so long?</p><p>Oh nothing. Just a small case of psychosis. He was losing his marbles. He had to find her and they were both getting out of here. He calms his nerves as best he can, typing out a reply.</p><p>KING-SN3K: coordinates. </p><p>Stumbling away from the place, he can’t help thinking it to himself, still scared out of his gourd. <em> ‘Make with ‘em fast, Angel Baby…’</em></p><hr/><p>It’s not a very far walk to what she’s been told is Howard’s house. It’s oddly short. In fact, it’s as if she’d passed it up on her way to the shops without giving it any notice. Bill stops right at the property’s edge, waving her towards this unique and depressive structure.</p><p>He’s nodding at her, telling her goodbye, in not so many words. “Ol’ Howard’s probably at the meeting, but if he’s a’ welcoming you to stay, you must’a be a VERY important person!” She thanks him, watching him walk back towards Deedman’s and leaving her to look at this…leering symbol of all that is utterly hideous. She notes the house’s coloring, its layout much different than the townhouses on either side of it. Grey wood lacquering, layered in crooked and obscene patterns along the upper floors, its windows completely intact, its shutters crooked. It sat much higher up on the street and unlike anything she’d seen before it, it was raised up high upon a serious of very old stone bricks.</p><p>The cellar door, she now faced, was parallel with the street. To the right of this brick layering, this rough and worn stone foundation, was a set of white washed steps, leading to the 2nd story, which contained the actual entrance into what she assumed was the living area. The longer she stands there, her heart palpitates, desolation emanating from this home like a nameless disease. She notes the cellar door, it’s unremarkable wood and the iron barred window, which allows her to gaze into the barren chamber. Completely made of stone, it resembles to her, a medieval dungeon of some kind.</p><p>The sun is now faded nearly entirely and she swears the moon is just on the other side of the horizon. The sky is split between pink pastel and burgeoning blackness. She checks her Pipboy for the time. Along with the glaring 7:17pm, she spies new entries from Butch, checking them, she’s typing in her location, searching for him along the other side of the road. It’s a fairly open small town, so she should be able to spot him right now.</p><p>“Yo! Angie!” Her head turns in the direction of Butch’s voice, expecting him to be right there beside her. When the space around her turns up empty, she’s perplexed. Her eye is drawn to stare up at Howard’s House, 4 stories high, including its small window in the attic. “Over here, Ange’!” She hears him and realizes that he’s taken it upon himself to explore the cellar of this place alone. Her tempered gait carries her to the cellar door, where she reaches for its rusted handle, curious as to where he’s hiding.</p><p>The cellar’s hinges groan, much like all the others in town, though all she has to do is pull for it to open up for her. She takes a step inside, the remains of battered and broken furniture all around the dank and surely musty room. To the far left there is a boiler and a bookcase, empty and webbed, the whole cellar giving off this terrible repulsive aura. To the right are shattered tables, and what might have been a place for people to eat. “Angel, over here. Come here!” There, at the back of the room, at the apex of it all, a kitchen area, a large fireplace at its center.</p><p>She’s now standing in the middle of the cellar and Butch’s voice, is rising up from the fireplace. “Can you hear me up there?” Her fingers itch on the stock of her shotgun. There, spilling out of the grate in the fireplace, under the smooth stone floor, is a collection of white fungus and black spores. She takes a step back, in a state of disbelief, Butch calling to her from behind the wall, sounding like a stranger. “…Don’t you want to see us? We’re all down here! The whole town! Come and see, Angie Girl!” She backs out of the room, when a heavy hand falls onto her shoulder.</p><p>She’s swinging the barrel of her gun to knock back whoever has caught her by surprise. Butch leaps back, holding his ribs in pain. He barks out at her, huffing like he’s been running for a very long time. “Hey, woah! Cool it! It’s me!” It takes her a moment to trust that. Her voice and her thoughts scrambling from the gravity of what she’d just experienced. “Did you hear it too?” </p><p>Butch’s whole frame is heaving. His arm guarding his ribs and his eyes focused on the cellar behind her. He looks from her to the inside of this dilapidated house, realizing that she’s acting kind of erratic. Reliving his own brush with the unexplainable. “What? What are you hearing?” He looks hard into the cellar, then fixes his sights on her.</p><p>She’s ignoring the cellar at her back, dropping her gun and assaulting Butch’s mask, looking for complications. He doesn’t take too kindly to it. She’s clutching at his arms and then tilting his jaw this way and that. He shares his concerns with her, dead set on getting them both out of here. “You’re losing it too! Just look at you! We’re in over our heads here!” He can’t move away from her probing hands.</p><p>Partly because the mask is too clunky and she’s too quick. Honestly though, after what just happened to him, he was finding comfort in her clumsy hands and didn’t want to be apart from her again. She ignores him until she is satisfied with her urgent assessment. “Your mask is fine! Everything still looks right.” She’s finding his hands and desperately pulling them up to her own protective headgear. Whatever has her spooked must be serious,</p><p>The way her voice stutters, leaves him torn. “-quick. Check mine! H-hurry up. COME ON!” She shouts, but he’s yelling right back, searching at her frantic request. “OK! YEESH! I’m looking, I’m looking!” Nothing. It’s on perfectly. Tighter than it should be maybe, but perfect.</p><p>Hands on her shoulders, the two of them in front of this unwelcoming home, he’s trying to make sense of her attitude. “It’s not the masks! It’s just this place! It’s messing with us!”</p><p>She shakes her head, getting planted in this stubborn place within her brain, which attempts to solve everything through logic. “We’re hallucinating. That’s all. There is no “It”. We’re going to be alright, Butch!” Anger bubbles up out of him and it comes out with a hoarse tear. “WE’RE NOT ALRIGHT! I’M NOT OK WITH ANY OF THIS!” If she has anything to say, he doesn’t hear it. Instead, he does what he wants to do- what he wishes he would have done the night he heard her crying from the kitchen window. He’s got her in his arms, crushing her against his chest like he’ll suffocate if he let’s go.</p><p>Her voice is trembling, emotional, but not full on crying. “With what exactly, Butch?” He’s not sure anymore. This place has been eating away at him ever since they went through the tunnel. He’s not usually scared easily by Wasteland dangers, but now, it’s definitely some outside force involved in bringing him to the brink of insanity. This trip has begun to give him some terrible absolutes, which he’s going to have to live with forever.</p><p>There are some things you just couldn't control, or explain away.</p><p>He’s afraid of a world where she’s not in it. He’s afraid of himself. He’s afraid of being forgotten. Most of all, he’s afraid that he’ll never be able to get across to her, just how much she means to him. Instead of saying any of that, he’s still shaking in his boots, over the things he’s just seen and heard. “YOU! I’m not ok with- with you walking away from me!”</p><p>She’s reciprocating his embrace and her thoughts are as weak as they ever were. <em> ‘I’m not walking away from you.’ </em>He’s so big and yet, her arms wrap around his lower back easily. She’s sighing and finding courage in his arms, attempting to leave the ugliness of their bickering behind them. “Then let’s stay together. We’ll stay close.” She squeezes him tighter and his arms are a monstrous, heavy blanket of security around her shoulders. He’s warm and the heat of his body is fighting the cold night air creeping up on them.</p><p>It’s easy to let things go, his voice lowered and fitful. “Sure, sure. Close as you’ll let me.” She’s laughing, otherwise she’ll be shaken. “Any closer and we’ll be naked.” He smiles under his mask, falling into the good humor without a fight. “Thought you didn't want to play ball?” She wants to hit him and kiss him at the same time and it’s maddening. She chokes on a laugh that feels like a sob, her head turned against his chest. “Shut up, Butch.”</p><p>He chuckles and it dawns on him. He hasn’t gotten to hold her like this in a long time. Too long. He’s looking into the cellar, saying something he didn’t expect to say at the moment. “You’re my only good side...only good thing about me.” It sobers him up, when she responds like she’s angry with him, but still says something kind. “You have lots of good sides! Notice it already!”</p><p>He relaxes against her and its infinitely less terrifying, to be comfortable like this. Compared to what he just went through before seeing her, this was the closest thing to heaven he would probably ever get. He’s pulling away slowly, grinning and bumping their masks together awkwardly. He curls his hand around the back of her head, letting himself ride the hysterical high of facing the unknown, by pretending to be brave. He’s laughing at himself, full of shit, talking too big. “What’re you talkin’ about? Course I noticed! I’m a real gas- baddest guy around!”</p><p>She’s shaking her head, knocking masks with him, aware of the darkness and the full moon rising. “Get real. Is it so hard to be with me? Honest?” His smile’s stolen and he imagines her pleading eyes, losing his cool. Spurred on by his gut, he’s ruffling her hair, pulling her forehead to his, basking in the warmth of being near her again, his voice devoid of a punchline. “I’m really, really sorry…about this whole week- the last month. I know I’ve been far away, ok?”</p><p>He’s not sure where the courage is coming from, but he carries on before she can talk back. “I blamed you for it, but it’s me ‘n my screwy head, alright? It’s not your fault. I’m…I’m just kind of…” He can’t say it, but it’s screaming at him like a banshee. One thought and one word, <em> ‘…Scared.’ </em>After all this time, he was still scared of himself. His feelings, his failings, and he’d been able to share them a lot easier with her before.</p><p>But something had changed. It was the scariest feeling in the world. It felt like forever. It felt like nothing he’d ever felt before. She was at the center of it too, this hard truth that he had to look at, right in the face.</p><p>He feels her hands on his jaw, impeded by his mask. She’s jostling him now, the two of them roughhousing a little, her laughter unhinged, but still bright. “It’s ok! It’s all ok! God, I…I know you’re sorry. I knew back in the cave!” He’s grinning now, the both of them delirious, just thankful for a light moment on his hellish escapade. He’s laughing too, just giving into the friendly emotions flowing between them. “So, NOW ya let me off the hook? What’s up with that, huh?” She’s shoving at his shoulders, but she’s not letting his jacket go, and he can tell that’s she searching for support from him.</p><p>Her words leave him twisted up in knots. “I was MAD at you too!” He knew it too, but with a breathless voice, she’s soothing a part of him, he didn’t think needed soothing. “I wanted to shoot you. You and Nova…and Stacy or whoever the hell you were mouthing off about…” She’s taking a step back, like she burned herself. He presses the issue, something sentimental creeping into his tone. “You know I’d never… I wouldn’t step out on you. Not like that.” She turns her back on him, stalking to the cellar door and its ominous presence. </p><p>She’s changing the subject, putting a chill in his bones. “We need to talk about what’s happening between us.” He doesn’t know what she’s on about, jumping to the natural conclusion. “I don’t know! Ok? Look when I said that, I just meant that I’ve been sweet on…real sweet on you.  -You won’t even let me-“She's reaching for the cellar door, pulling the thing shut, cutting him off, bringing him back to reality. “-I meant about the hallucinations.” He’s stuck on his previous thought, feeling dumb, watching her struggling to close the basement door.</p><p>Deadpanning, he shoves his hands in his pockets. “Oh…” For some reason the door refuses to budge. She’s suspicious of the way the stone is grating against the bottom of it. It’s as if the very ground is rising up to defy her. She’s not ready for a full talk about his recent behavior, but she feels like they’re back to a better place, her voice strained with physical exertion. “-I…I think it’s stuck.”</p><p>He’s not thinking twice about it, reaching around her, her back to his chest. He’s helping her pull, gritting his teeth, the wood starts to move and he’s grunting into her ear gracelessly. “The things I do for you.” It comes grinding shut finally, with the two of them out of breath. He’s leaning against the doorframe, her back against his chest. It brings back fond memories of vault walls and fleeting moments of trying to get her all to himself.</p><p>When she leans back into him, his heart tries to melt on him. Then she’s sweet, when she’d been nothing but business with him this whole trip and it just jerks his heart around. She voices a gentle compliment through the mask’s speaker. “You know I want to... run around all the bases with you. Hit home runs...I want to do it with you all the time....” She’s leaning against him heavily, the back of her head against his shoulder, small and light, whispering made deafening by the mask’s comm. “…you know that right?”</p><p>With all the stalling, the truth was no. No he didn’t know that. He was starting to think that there was something wrong with him. He forgot the last time he got to say something this intimate to her, but maybe the full moon was casting magic, on an otherwise distasteful resting place. “…what’s holding you back…?” She didn’t know honestly.</p><p>This place, had a sense about it, when peace dared to show itself. The darkness would have been pitch black, if not for the full face of the moon. With their hearts calmed for but one moment, the house, rejects it. Once again, up out of the fireplace, that faceless “Butch” moans her name like it’s dying. “<em> Aaaaa-ngel!” </em> Her head jerks up to stare into the cellar and she feels Butch wrap his arm around her waist, his motion swift, struck with terror.</p><p>To her horror, but also as a morbid and terrible comfort, his voice is shaking in her ear. “Th-that’s not me.” She’s got her hand on his, the cellar now even darker than it had been before, her voice trembling, confirming the impossible. “You hear it too.” A foul and wicked thing, groans her name behind the fireplace. “<em>S</em><em>TAY WITH ME ANGEL! <strong>Aaaaa-ngel</strong>!" </em>She’s back peddling into him and he’s lifting her up, scrambling away from the house. After 10 feet, he sits her back down, and she’s twirling around, hands on his shoulders, coming up with a game plan. “Where’d you park the bike?”</p><p>Hope flitters in his voice, “Ha! Yeah, let’s fuckin’ go! Right now-“She’s shaking her head, steeling herself, now aware that with Butch, she can handle whatever awaits them. She sticks a pin in his balloon, pointing towards the steps leading up into the house itself. “-No, no! The saddlebag! Listen, whatever’s down there, we’re going to stop it!” Butch’s growling at her, anger and frustration writhing around inside him, to cover the deep seeded horror, which is tempting him to burn the whole town to the ground. “Stop it? <b>You</b> stop it! There’s no one here but me and you-“ She interrupts him, her thoughts on the weapons she left in his saddlebag. “-and Bill! He’s the only one I found, but Butch, what if there’s more?”</p><p>He opens his mouth, ready to say “screw this town” again, but then it hits him. What if he was trapped here like the settlers might be? No, he doesn’t care, he just wants to take her and run. Saying’ as much, looking over to the townhouse, which he’d parked his bike beside. “Bill?! Who in the heck is Bill!? Screw BILL! I’m the only one DUMB enough to listen to you!” He sighs, knowing he’s beat, and before she can protest again, he tries to bite the bullet and give in the best he can. “FINE! Fine! We’re doing this. I’m doing this. What am I getting?”</p><p>She’s swallowing thickly, watching over his shoulder, as a fog begins to roll in. In a rush, she’s listing off items, her backpack being one of them. “Flamer canisters, Stimpacks, Rad-away, Sleeping Bags-“He’s stalking away, rushing to his bike, but gets caught on the words, “Sleeping Bags?! Why? Awe, no, no…come on-“Ignoring him she’s looking around in a pile of rubble, by the road. Using her strength to tug an old washing machine over to block off the cellar door, she’s interrupting him. “-We’re going to rest inside till daylight.”</p><p>The day light will be an advantage.</p><p>Butch’s devilish doppelganger has gone silent behind the fireplace. The thought of it manifesting itself again, gives her the strength to keep going with the washer much faster, watching Butch stalk off to the right, hearing him protesting the whole way. “Are you nuts?! Who’s going to be able to rest?! Who? You?! Sure’s not gonna me!” Butch’s whole being is rejecting staying in that house. His bike is a lot closer than he expected and that gives him fleeting joy. Then he sees it, rolling in from the very ground itself. </p><p>There’s fog rising up from the earth and it looks a lot like the fog in the tunnel.</p><p>Black. Unfriendly. It’s got him starting his bike and rolling up on it to where Angie is now pacing in front of the house. She regards him with a nod, rushing over to his saddle bag. He’s got his arms crossed, his bike now parked in front of the house.</p><p>He’s more concerned with a quick get-away than having it remain hidden. They turn on their lights, Pipboy’s glowing green.  He’s just watching the fog get thicker. She’s seemingly oblivious to it, prompting him to say something about it. “That uh…that look like fog to you?” She stops digging through their supplies and looks up.</p><p>Her heart sinks, her voice unconvincing. “…that’s why we’re wearing masks.” She’s on her feet. Her pack full of supplies now secured on her shoulder, she looks like she’s full of resolve. She’s emptying out their saddle bag. She didn’t want to leave anything important behind.</p><p>They begin to climb the wooden steps, the railing broken and gone in places. Butch looks down at the washing machine jammed in front of the cellar door, finding comfort in the sight. The front door to what is surely a literal house of horrors, now stands before them. She goes to walk in first, but something in him stops her, his voice full of command, which he’s still getting used to even now. “I’ll go. You’ve been taking point too much.” She pauses.</p><p>She steps aside and lets him go first. He immediately regrets it, but reaches for the handle either way. When the door opens the house is not much better than the cellar. He doesn’t have to think to know to have his gun out. The entry way, moldering and the walls rotted through in certain places. </p><p>The kitchen on his left, is also the foyer, a sad amalgamation of peeling-wallpaper, falling plaster, rickety staircases, and such.</p><p>The moment his boot hits the wooden floor, it’s like a shock of sinister electricity rattles against his bones. There is a staircase ahead, which leads up to the 2nd floor, the rooms surely full of things hidden and yet unhidden, sights seen…and yet unseen. Butch is getting used to the perpetual awful feeling, which has presented itself in every building of this town. Angie’s voice, thinking out loud behind him. “…Howard…Philips…” He looks back at her, where she is still standing outside at the front door.</p><p>Eager to walk back out again, after checking his Pipboy for red dots or radiation, he stops to find the source of what has her staring. There is a certain kind of presences about this house. The town of course is both dilapidated and sickly, an overture of what might keep a person awake at night, terrors and nightmares stealing their dreams, personified by rotted wormwood. The house itself, is of a realm of its own and as that feeling settles between them, they’re now both staring at a very old postage box. It sticks into the rocks like an effigy, the initials H.P. carved into its humble tin lid, marking the owner’s existence in this house in, an eternal, yet vague manner.</p><p>She’d uttered the name to herself, merely as an unsure hypothesis, or perhaps as an inquiry for him to unravel, much as his perception of the real and the imaginary, had begun to fall into tatters. As if it had a mind for its own nefarious purpose, the black fog of St. Hellen’s thickens, drawing them to gage its engorged cloud, like one would note a wolf eyeing a sheep from the sheep’s perspective. Perspective was everything whether you were the wolf or the sheep, the steps providing an advantageous view of the road below, the very sight of that blackened lively apparition, forcing them to retreat into the house of Howard, as the black miasma covered the town like soot from a broken crematorium. Forced into the entryway, by sheer lack of other options, their blood thick with the vinegar of terror’s bite, they prepared diligently for what may come, friends, lovers, and war hero’s that they were.</p><p>There were, unbeknownst to the souls now privy to the devious machinations of St. Helens, baffling and peculiar things at work. Unknown and unknowable, which by no means could any sane soul steel themselves against. Nor by any mundane power, contain. Or by any sanctification, cleanse. It was a battle, which no mortal of any stature, could prepare for.</p><hr/><p>The two of them set up base in the kitchen. </p><p>The wooden floorboards beneath their sleeping bags feel too thin for their liking. Whatever had taken up residence in the cellar, was far too close for Butch to feel comfortable. So instead, he sat across from her and tried to ignore the black, fuzzy room farther back behind her. Upon turning the corner of this dilapidated, rotten place, they’d discovered blacker, vine-like obstructions that had completely overwhelmed the back rooms of the house. It hadn’t made its way into the kitchen, but the whole back portion of the home was covered it in, from walls to ceiling, like a giant coarse pile of wires or hair.</p><p>The longer they stared, the more it felt as if the vines were moving or as if the blackness coalesced into a fathomless depth, which could be fallen into like a portal or a pit. She’s watching him work on preparing the Flamer and its canisters, the green glow of their Pipboy’s, filling the room with light and motion. They wanted to keep their vitals on display to constantly check them. If it wasn’t the spores driving them to the brink of their mental capacity, then whatever this was, was brought on from something else. When Butch had told her about the warehouse and she told him about the message he’d never sent, Dunwich had come back to her mind fresh and haunting.</p><p>To this very night, she had no recollection of any natural cause for her hallucinations. The only factor which gave her solidarity, was that Butch was seeing them too. Strange and unexplainable phenomenons. She was usually afraid to bring him with her on a constant and subconscious level, ever protective of the man she loved. Not tonight and in fact, Butch’s presence felt like the only real thing about this whole place.</p><p>She’s observing the walls, the mold, and the black sand storm outside of the kitchen window. Not sand, but spores, disturbed by some unseen force. Left in the silence, they were trapped in the groans and the hair-raising howls of the wind, as it shook the walls of this moldering relic. She’s cross legged on her sleeping bag, their gas masks necessary and still firmly secured to their faces. It’s unusual not being able to see Butch’s face.</p><p>She’s making idle conversation, remembering a story she knew, about a house much like this one. “…Have you ever read The Shunned House?” The radio on her mask crackles to life, Butch’s hands pausing in the maintenance work he’s doing. His head turns up, focusing on her and pushing away the foul images, which are playing out behind her in the darkness. He’s never heard the story before, tells her that too, feeling a prickle on the back of his neck. “Nope.” At first, he thinks a story would offer a good distraction, but her voice is now hinting, that it’s not a very pleasant read. “…It’s a short story about a house much like this one.”</p><p>She’s relaxing a bit, caught up on the idea to frighten him a bit, if only to ease the tension around them, and perhaps distract herself from this terrible place. He’s leaning forward on his hands, morbidly interested at first and she’s got a mean grin beneath her mask, her voice lowered for effect. “A man and his uncle, have watched the place for a long, long time…” He’s got his back to the kitchen sink and the ramshackle wooden cabinets, not too happy about what’s going on outside the window.  He can hear the tone of her voice and is starting to re-think listening to her. She carries on however, unimpeded. “…the ground doesn’t let anything grow. The people who stay there seem to rot in one way or another. They get sick, have nightmares, go crazy…no one knows why.”</p><p>Butch speaks up, and goes back to building the Flamer, not wanting to listen to a scary story, when he’s already in one. “-I don’t think I want to hear it, Ange’.” Instead of being discouraged, a mean delight fills her chest. Butch could be superstitious and jumpy at the best of times. It was definitely not the best of times and a part of her, was still feeling vindictive towards him. She remembers the story in detail, because it was one of her favorites to have read in the vault. “-no sane person had ever seen it, and few had ever felt it definitely.”</p><p>She’s been scrolling through her Pipboy, trying to find a map of the area they are in. For some reason, her map was refusing to work properly. It was as if there was a signal jammer or some electrical current blocking her Pipboy’s frequency, along with their long range radio communation. She could message Butch, but nobody else outside of him. Even her radio had refused to work and static had greeted her instead of songs.</p><p>There was no way GNR could have ever been heard in this forsaken town.</p><p>Butch swallows thickly, listening intently to her against his will. “…they thought it was a vampire at first.” Butch mumbles at her, finally finished preparing their Flamer for whatever waited in the cellar below them. “…I know what you’re doin’ and it’s not gonna work.” She’s given up on her Pipboy and instead turned her full attention to her partner, carrying on, absorbed in the story now herself. “…It was rising from the cellar at night and showing up in the house’s windows. Sulpherous vapors, incorporeal, human in resemblance… ghostlike. They decided to find the source of it…”</p><p>Butch snaps at her, slamming the Flamer to the side and feeling unamused by her attempt to frighten him. “-And then they died! Cool. Shut up, Angie.” She’s crawling closer to him, with a bitter note to her tone. She says it lacking the mischievousness she’d had before, dwelling on the fate of the men in her mind. “There are things worse than death, Deloria.” Having to stay in this house alone, would have been one of them in her mind. Butch is silent.</p><p>It’s long enough to allow her to keep going, now at the edge of his sleeping bag, still speaking in that grim, dark voice. “They entered the cellar, with the thought to defeat the thing. This man and his uncle… he awakes to find his uncle, melting before his very eyes…” Butch speaks through gritted teeth, the two of them now sitting across from each other on his sleeping bag. “…Quit trying to creep me out.” She doesn’t take the hint, instead directly quoting the story, wracking her brain for the exact words. “…In that dim blend of blue and yellow the form of my uncle had commenced a nauseous liquefaction…” On the edge of his seat, Butch is leaning closer to her, at odds with himself. He’s not sure if he’d rather hear her story or the evil sounds of the house talking to him.</p><p>Her voice is softer, pulling him in. “…whose essence eludes all description.” Her hands are on his knees now and he’d already wanted to jump out of his skin before she began to carry on. Her tone is hushed, as if her words will conjure up the very tragedy she is describing, if it’s spoken of too loudly. “…in which there played across his vanishing face…” Her fingers are clutching at his knees more tightly, leaning on them heavily, mixed emotions roiling inside of him.</p><p>The floorboards seem to protest in their shared weight, groaning under the sound of her dulcet tones. “…such changes of identity, as only madness can conceive.”</p><p>This whole trip felt like that in a nutshell. Like you would have to be out of your mind to live in this town, let alone try to save it. Here he was, a mad man. Her voice seems to drag on, her fingers letting up on where they’ve got his knees clutched within them. “…He was at once a devil and a multitude…” She’s always been good at telling stories, it was something he truly…enjoyed about her.</p><p>He did not enjoy, the descriptions she was bringing to life, her voice nearly as awful as the whispering wind. “…a charnel-house…” His attention is fixated on where her eyes should be, lulled into a state of unease, her voice carries throughout the entire home. “…and a pageant.” She’s sliding back to sit on the floor, dragging her fingers, drawing him in, the shadows dancing on her gas mask, still telling her tale. “Lit by mixed and uncertain beams, that gelatinous face assumed a dozen—a score—a hundred—aspects…” She painted in his mind, a grotesque picture, which he couldn’t stop. Her fingernails give him shivers to collude with the goosebumps on his legs from this poorly timed nightmare of a story.</p><p>Her voice raises up loudly, little by little, to make him clench up on purpose. “-Grinning. It sank to the ground…” She swats his knees and makes him jump, forces a curse out of him. “-Hell’s bells, Blackwell!” He wonders if she’s smiling, but her voice doesn’t sound like she is anymore. “…on a body that melted like tallow…” Her hands fall away from his body, leaving him with a chill. She sits back, peering at him sheepishly from behind her mask, unable to stop herself from finishing. “…in the caricatured likeness of legions strange…” </p><p>He’s glancing at the blacked abyss of a room behind her, the sound of her voice, quiet and receding. “…and yet not strange.” Two glowing eyes stare back at him. Followed by a skittering of feet. He’s tearing her up and behind him, screaming, “-EYES! There’s eyes in the room! EYES!” She’s at his back, holding onto his shoulder’s the two of them now forced to face with whatever’s in the room behind them. She’s behind him, sounding a lot less confident now. “…I see them too.”</p><p>
  <em> MROAW! </em>
</p><p>She’s wrapping her arms around his waist and she's laughing, like she’s touched in the head. “It’s just the cat…” Butch is hyperventilating and rounding on her, as the cat comes trotting up from the vines, claws clicking on the floor delicately. “-What is WRONG with you?! Telling me that kind of story right now?!” She’s swallowing thickly, as the cat jumps onto the counter behind them, oblivious to the stir it caused. She looks up at him, smiling guiltily, not that he can see, apologizing. “…Yeah, sorry. Just wanted to… scare you a little.” He’s glaring at her and she doesn’t need to see him do it, to hear it in his tone. “Mission accomplished. I’m jumping at nothing and going insane without you adding to it! Keep that kind of stuff to yourself!”</p><p>She’s shrugging and muttering at him, still feeling a little mischief curling in her chest. “…I thought you liked it when I read to you.” He’s sighing and looking over his shoulder at the shadowy room plaguing his mind. He wants to burn it, all the black mold or plant like whatever. The spores outside were so thick, there was no moonlight to be had and so the only light was being given by their Pipboy’s. He’s piping up, now obsessed with the memory of how just one bullet lit up that tunnel they’d gone through like Armageddon. “It’ll light right up if I shoot at it. That’s all it’d take! A-And we could get on my bike and-“ </p><p>He feels her hands clasping one of his between them softly. Imploring him to turn and face her. She squeezes his hand and says something, which oddly feels like she’s referring to more than just the horror show they’re staring in. “…I’m scared too.” It gives him pause, makes him question why he’d been afraid of being so comfortable with her. He’d give anything to go back to that right now.</p><p>That night, they fall asleep together, side by side.</p><hr/><p>She awakes from a nightmare. </p><p>The walls were alight with carvings and strange runes, a multitude of voices chanting in what might have been French, resounding from nowhere in particular. In the dream, she’d been alone and the house had appeared to be in another dimension entirely. She looked out the window and saw a shifting, endless void. Then Butch’s voice called her to look into the room, which was infested with those black, mossy vines.</p><p>He stood there grinning like a maniac, the vines now writhing like tentacles or fat worms under his feet. Then Butch began to melt into the floorboards. It was just like the uncle in the story she’d conjured up. As if it couldn’t get any worse, he spoke and the words that came out, were the same that he’d told her, had shown up in the warehouse. “Stay and decay, with the rest of us!” Then she awoke to another nightmare entirely.</p><p>Somehow, she’d fallen asleep in this place and Butch, was nowhere to be found. She could see that he’d been busy. There were now Molotov’s stacked neatly in a pile at the foot of his/her sleeping bag. The cat is also gone. She gets up and dares to look into the moldy, black room looming beside her.</p><p>Nothing but still, unmoving blackness.</p><p>She gets up, the spore storm still raging outside. He couldn’t have left her. He wouldn’t have. She’s getting up and calling out blindly for him. “Butch! Where are you?” <em> THUMP! </em></p><p>It startles her. From the entry way, she hears a thump and a rattle, and reaches for her gun. She glances at her Pipboy for any new messages. Nothing. She creeps towards the entryway, a hollow wind whistling at the front door.</p><p>That’s when she spots it at the top of the stairs. A ladder leading up to the attic had fallen. The attic is pitch-black, as devilish and as maddening as whatever laid below her. She’s not sure what possesses her to, but the sight is enough to fill her with terror. The overwhelming urge to run, consumes her.</p><p>Fear, raw and crazed, drives her to turn on her heels and stare at the front door. She could run. She could take his bike and run. Far, far away from St. Helens. She’d be safe. </p><p>Butch was fine. He was already gone. These whisperings inside her mind, weren’t her own, but her own voice, was masking them within her head. She’s reaching for the door handle, mindless and sluggish. She barely makes out the cat, as it winds around her legs affectionately and has her pausing for one minor moment.</p><p>She opens the door a crack allowing a good amount of black, spore dust to pour in- <em> BAM! </em>“What are you doing?! Are you nuts?!” He’s turning her around by her shoulders and got her against the door, shaking her back to her senses. Her breath stutters back into her lungs, as if some kind of spell had been broken on her senses. Half delirious, she replies to him. “There’s something in the attic…” He’s pulling her away from the door and the spore dust is luckily falling to the floor, tripping towards the stairs, he’s barking at her tersely. “Yeah! ME! I was up there!”</p><p>Her head turns to look back at the attic and sure enough, she sees light coming from it. She looks back him, bumping into his mask clumsily with her own, he’s letting his hands slide off her shoulders, his voice shaking. “The farther I can get from whatever’s under us, the better!” She’s whispering at him, shaken up. “I…I don’t know what came over me.” It was as if she hadn’t be in control of her own body.</p><p>He’s pulling her up the stairs and into the attic with him.</p><p>The attic is empty and just as darkly oppressed as the rest of the house. She has to agree with Butch’s sentiment however. The farther away from the cellar they were, the better. He closes the trap door, but not before letting the cat up to join them. The 3 of them wait till daylight, barely getting any sleep between them.</p><p>When the sunlight finally reaches the attic window, both of them are exhausted. They’d been sitting back to back all night, leaning against each other. She’s the first to speak. “It’s time.” They descend from the attic, the ghoulified cat nowhere to be seen, both of them feeling drained. It was as if the house has sucked the life right out of them. They gather up supplies from the kitchen, letting their sleeping bags lie, she opts to leave her backpack here as well.</p><p>They’ve got the Molotov’s, a Flamer, and she had brought a particular Shish-ka-bob as well. Her shotgun, was ever her favorite companion, holstered at her back. Butch strapped on the flamer and together, the two opened the front door, looking down towards the cellar. The washing machine, which she’d shoved in front of it, was toppled over. The cellar door was still tightly shut however.</p><p>She’s taking the lead, his eyes on the back of her head. He’s hit with a very strong thought. He didn’t care if she out grew him one day. He just wanted to be at her side, for as long as he could be. They arrive at the bottom of the steps, a grim silence between them, now once again at the door to the unknown.</p><p>They work together to pull it open again and Butch scoffs, “You just had to be a hero.” With a final grunt they get it open and she’s wipes the sweat from her brow, talking back. “Someone has to be.” They are once again face to face with the dank, dark cellar. She walks to the bookcase, addressing him from across the stone floor. “There’s a vault underneath this town, right?” Butch had talked about what he may or may not know about the town’s history.</p><p>His grasp on reality felt tenuous as of late. He crosses the room and dust kicks up under his feet. He’s now standing at the empty fireplace. Looking over the mantle and trying to find a lever or a button maybe. He's not even sure what to look for at this point.</p><p>He answers her, making out a very faint clatter of feline claws walking into the cellar after them. “-No idea! Guess we’re gonna find out.” The wiry black cat, who Butch had decided to call “Frankenstein”, skitters over to him and hops up onto the fireplace, seemingly having bonded with him over night. It sits on the mantle, watching him curiously. No sooner does the spindly creature sit down, does Butch hear a very loud click. A terrible grinding sound like gears out of joint, rises up from the fireplace like a vile curse.</p><p>Backpedaling, Angie’s right there beside him, the two watching, as the stone at the back of it peels away, to reveal a hidden alcove. A dark and endless tunnel, covered in black vines and white mushrooms. A crawl space. Butch scowls, stating the facts. “No way are we fitting the Flamer through there...” The sense of being watched, had not left either of them and in the rush to get here, they’d been careless.</p><p>They would soon realize that, but it would be too late.</p><p>She expected Butch to complain or to stop her or at the very least, to point out how vulnerable they would be crawling through the tunnel. Instead, he was more put together than she expected. He’d slipped off the Flamer and got to work unhooking the canisters, talking his way through what he’d planned. “I’ll bring the fuel. We can still dump it out on whatever’s around. I’m betting the vines hate fire as much as any other plant.” He grunts and rests the flamer against the wall beside the fireplace, they’re face to face again, with him shrugging at her, tone filled with false bravery. “Here’s hoping I’m right.” To her shock, he tries to go first.</p><p>Like hell she’d let him. She puts her hand on his shoulder, stopping him, walking around him and taking command. “-Let me go.” He looks down at her, reluctant to let her. She’s thankful she brought the Shish-Ka-Bob. It’s portable and small enough to fit into the limited space of that cavernous tunnel. She’s on her hands and knees, forced to look directly into what appears to be a pulsating and moving chamber.</p><p>Her bare palms hit the black, fuzzy obstruction, finding them to be mossy, congealed, and slimy. Unpleasant and cold. Touching them for too long, feels dangerous and wrong, but they’ve got no choice. They make their way into the tunnel, unable to see the end of it, the walls stony and covered in various sizes of mushrooms, the vines, like eels writhing all around them.</p><p>It is Butch’s absolute worst nightmare. He’d always felt claustrophobic on some level in the vault. This was due to both his personality, the strict vault hierarchy, and the fact that he’d been traumatized at a young age. His mother had forgotten him in one of the rooms adjourned to the sewing hall, where the women would embroider. That dark closet sized room, felt like a mansion compared to where he was now.</p><p>He still remembers the scratching legs of the rad roaches in the vents and how nobody came for him, no matter how afraid he’d been. He cried, until finally Stanley found him at age 5, locked in that closet for hours. He’s hyperventilating, unable to see what’s ahead of her. She hears him struggling to stay calm, her heart aching for him, as she reaches out to comfort him with a shivering collection of affirmations. “It’s ok, Butch. I think I…I think it’s getting wider up ahead.” Low and behold, the tunnel begins to get bigger and bigger.</p><p>They’re soon able to stand up and walk through it, as blue bioluminescent bulbs, start to light their way. The bulbs are attached to the vines like glow bugs, phantasmal and bright, a light now visible at the end of the tunnel. They aren’t sure how long it had taken, but the journey had felt like eons. They find themselves at the entrance to a momentous cistern, which seems to span over 30 stories high and went on for maybe a 3rd of a mile. It’s as if the cavern ceiling had melted and merged with the floor, creating pillars of support, at 7 or 8 different intervals.</p><p>The ink black tendrils, the fungus, the spores, she looks up and finds the source. She has faced so many things, but never, ever anything like this. Her voice is drenched in complete horror, her eyes unable to look away from the sight. “God help us…” The vines can be traced back to the largest Vault door, that she’s ever seen. It’s open and spilling forth a profane life, which seems to taint the very ground around them.</p><p>They’re under the mountain.</p><p>The longer she stares into that crack, the large 6 on the Vault door barely visible through the crawling muck, the more she doubts her own eyes. Butch has gone completely silent and even with him beside her, she no longer feels safe. The more she stares, the more it feels as if her skull wants to split open. She takes a step forward, unable to gather her wits, when a distant and otherworldly singing quietly starts to rise up from the deep behind the door. How could something be and yet feel so wrong?</p><p>To look upon the inside of Vault 6, was to look upon madness itself. By some sheer miracle, she tears her eyes away and without warning or sugar coating it, she shoves Butch’s head down. Her vision swimming, as she follows the vines, snapping at Butch, sharp and short. “Don’t look inside it.” He does not argue or even question her. He’s already begun to pour out a trail of fuel in their wake, his only thought, being to burn everything he possibly could.</p><p>That vault was so full of vines, it was pitch black. The darkest, darkness she’d ever seen and somehow, she could not grasp its depths. She presses onward, vaguely recalling a control panel at the foot of that unspeakable void. The longer she had looked, the more she’d felt herself come apart at the hidden seams which God himself only knew how to stitch. Butch has never been so quiet before.</p><p>She understands now, what lies beyond the vault door. As soon as the thought pierces her mind, the same musty smell, which had invaded her before, rises up like a cloying sentient vapor. It wasn’t an attack on their masks, it was an attack on their minds. As if to confirm it’s unnatural visage as a dark moldering shadow attached to her brain, an inhumanly human utterance moans out of the vault, like an intangible thing which shouldn’t be able to stay on this plane of existence. Illegible, she lights up her Shish-Ka-Bob and understands.</p><p>It was a cosmic horror, which neither of them could ever comprehend with their mortal eyes. She’d looked at it for too long already, feeling as though she had lost a piece of herself to the vault’s depths forever. Still forced to stare at the floor, they reach the console and she devises their only option. They cannot fight whatever lies inside of that vault, but they can contain it. She feels Butch’s body beside her, uncharacteristically silent, trusting blindly that her words will reach him. “We’re going to shut the door.”</p><p>He is obedient and not himself. Wordless. He feels the wrongness of this place, like a part of him has been destroyed by it. Violently, he snatches her sword out of her hand and begins to slash at the writhing amalgamations, which are now obscuring the console screen from them. The vines shriek in response, catching on fire like gunpowder on the floor, roiling their bellies with nausea. </p><p>He’s handing her sword back, the two of them working without having to speak. He’s having to search the shattered remnants of his mental threshold for the intelligence to hack the terminal. His hands remain steady, by a willpower which he hadn’t realize that he possessed. Tasting their hope in the air, that unknowable aberration is immediate to tear at their resolve. A voice ancient and wrong, mimicking its deep speech in a mockery of humanity, pours forth from Vault 6, one voice and a multitude. “They stay and are remade...I hunger... I wait for you…”</p><p>His hands start to shake, everything within him rejecting the voice, as if it is directly at odds with his very atoms. He’s no longer talking to her and instead, he’s muttering algorithms to himself, every last brain cell focused on shutting that voice away. “…backdoor…trick the lock…wrong…side door…password…guess the pattern…” A slimy tendril wraps around his wrist and all at once, the vines come to life and have them fighting for theirs. She’s quick to action, snatching up her sword.</p><p>Butch barely registers the danger, because if he stopped coding, he knew he’d stop moving altogether. Angie slashes at the vine around his wrist and the thing squeals, the whole area around them now teaming with whipping tentacles, as she fights for their lives. Slashing and whirling about, a new vine rising up from the fire, as another recoils and is burnt to ash. Under pressure, sweating, Butch’s finally breaking through, running his encryption program from his Pipboy, muttering to himself weakly. “…come on…come on…come on…” The terminal lights up, covered in ashes, black ooze, and rust.</p><p>He’s at the command screen. </p><p>He selects “Emergency Override” and “Close” in a daze, fighting the singing in his head, with everything he has. He’s tempted to look up. They hear the sirens of the vault door wail and a flashing red light washes the cavern in its glow. He hears her voice in his ear, the musty smell getting to him, and terrible thoughts chasing on its heels. “Something’s wrong.” That smell seems to say, <em> ‘Come inside. It’s nice in here.’  </em></p><p>And to his horror, it’s starting to make sense. He dares to glance up, forced to see what the problem is. He doesn’t look directly inside, instead fixing his eyes on the big yellow 6, which is still covered in black tendrils like veins in an exposed organ. He can see the darkness in his periphery and its form is the purest expression of everything that is rotten, rotted, and abhorrent. He’s ripping his gaze away, understanding the problem.</p><p>His voice is monotone, his body frozen, in shock. “It’s the vines. The door can’t shut.” Again, the creature speaks, its mere existence a cancerous fallacy on the earth. “Stay and be remade…” Strong and hard, she growls with the voice of The Lone Wanderer of legend. “To hell with that. I hope you like fire, motherfucker.” She’s snatched up a Molotov from his belt and lighting it up. Using VATS, she’s able to see inside the crack without losing precious amounts of sanity.</p><p>Her aim is true. No sooner than that bottle goes flying does she light up another. The fire and the glass shatter against the innards of the vault , burning the outermost vines to ashes, faster than they can fight back. Like liquid insanity, it’s pained and deafening roar rattles the insides of their skulls, making it harder to focus on even basic tasks. Butch is locked up at the controls, waiting.</p><p>She tosses another flaming bottle and when Butch hears the glass shatter, he’s entering the command repeatedly. Close, close, close. The massive 5 story high door, scrapes against its ancient frame and by some stroke of luck, begins to drown out the garbled legions behind it. The vines are crawling down the cistern walls and fighting to make it back inside the door. He hears it one last time, speaking with Evangeline’s voice now, his skin wanting to slip off his bones with revulsion at it's unholy mimicking. “Come play with me, Butchie! I’ll let you slide right into home! Come play with me!”</p><p>Another voice amongst the multitude, follows after. “The old ways are best! The old waaaays are best!” Elmira’s voice. He’s retching, his every sense overloaded to the very end with things incompatible with the human mind. Finally, the door shuts and seals it all away. They are left there in complete darkness. </p><p>The vines outside of the vault wither and die, killing the bioluminescent glow of them in the process.</p><p>The lights of the Pipboy’s and the burning fires spread out all around them, making the shadows dance on the walls. She whimpers beside him, suspended in time. “Burn it. All of it.” On autopilot, Butch stands to his full height, having been slumped over the console and using it to keep himself from dissolving onto the floor. He’s unhooking the next canister of flamer fuel from his belt and dumping it out around the areas closest to them. When that one runs dry, he unhooks another.</p><p>It’s purely for peace of mind, since the room is much too large to cover with the amount of gasoline they have. He’s not sure how long he spends just pouring fuel on the fire, but it’s long enough to be concerned over. His mind clears for long enough to have him observing the pillars amongst the raging flames. Too late does he realize, that the smoke is getting dangerous and the fire is blazing out of control.</p><p>Too late to contain it, but not too late to save them both. She’s still standing where he left her and hasn’t moved an inch. Calling out to her, he’s gesturing to the exit. “Angel! ANGEL! We gotta go!” She doesn’t even look at him and it hits him like a sack of bricks. She’s out of it.</p><p>The flames are licking at his skin and it’s hot enough to hurt just being in here now. He’s running toward her, shouting. “ANGIE! COME ON!” He has to dodge and weave through his trail of fuel, but he manages to make it to her. He shoves her, still trying to get her attention. “Damn it, Angel, <b>burn</b> <b>rubber</b>!” She stumbles forward towards where he shoved her to the exit. </p><p>She’s shaking. He makes a split second decision and ends up lifting her up into his arms. She’s like a ragdoll, going without a fight, her Shish-Ka-Bob now sheathed on her hip. He’s running for the tunnel, weak enough from the terror that she’s actually hard for him to carry.  It’s when they’re standing at the entrance, smoke steadily filling the space up behind them, that he realizes something.</p><p>He wants this place buried so far and deep, that it’ll never be found by anyone ever again. </p><p>He goes to set her down, her feet hitting the floor clumsily. She looks up at him, barely lucid, her voice in a daze. “Where are you going…?” He’s coughing from the smoke, carbon monoxide unable to be filtered through the gas mask making him dizzy; he’s feeling like his eyebrows are burning off, 500 feet of solid fire, laid out before him. He’s pulling up VATS, answering her with a surge of fresh emotion pushing him towards his goal. “I’m gonna cave it in. The ceiling.” He’s only got his .44 but it’s got a scope and he could compete with the best Sniper’s out there on a good day.</p><p>This was not a good day however and he was relying on VATS heavily. Low and behold, 4 central points of weight around the rounded cavern’s ceiling support system. He whips out his pistol, taking aim. Adrenaline makes his hand shake. He fires.</p><p>He misses. She’s pulling on his jacket limply, regaining some of her own composure. “…it’s time to go, Butch.” His every bone is screaming within him. “NO! I’m burying it! ALL OF IT!” He takes aim at the first support. He fires.</p><p>Hit.</p><p>The flames are now licking closer, rushing him along. He takes aim. He Fires. It hits the pillar and that pillar cracks straight up to the quick. He ignores the fire, the hand on his jacket, and the danger.</p><p>Another hit and the ceiling above them starts to shatter and crack, large pieces of rock now falling above them. Evangeline yells at him, loud in his ear. “IT’S COMING DOWN! LET’S GO!” But no…not until he makes his last shot. The final support is there in his sights, smoke obscuring it, VATS revealing it. He takes aim and fires.</p><p>He doesn’t get the chance to see if it hits, because The Lone Wanderer is now dragging him out behind her at a brutal sprint. Behind them the rumble of what could compare to a hundred jet engines, makes their ears pop. Dust and smoke chasing after them, as they are forced to scrambling on their hands and knees. Whether a trick of the mind or of the evil under the mountain, the tunnel is much shorter than it had been before. The two come rolling out into the cellar, expecting to see daylight.</p><p>The tunnel caves in behind them as if it never existed. They are morbidly shocked to be welcomed by moonlight as it coats the cellar walls with its mournful ambiance. The flamer lays abandoned by the fireplace and Butch struggles to his feet, pulling her up next to him. Usually it was the other way around. He’s ushering her outside into the cold night air and turning back to get the Flamer.</p><p>The cat, Frankenstein, is nowhere to be found. He drags the Flamer across the stone, his whole body burning and shaking, stopping to rip off his gas mask and leave it where it lays. She’s not much better, tearing her own mask away, having to taste the musty cellar for the first time in bulk, and feeling bile in the back of her throat. They’re both choking on the fresh out air outside and stand there right where they first started. When she has enough time to process it all, guilt and terror fill her in equal parts.</p><p>They shouldn’t have come here. She should have gotten here sooner, because maybe the vault was still closed when the letter had come. The letter. She’s reaching into her jacket’s inner lining and pulling it out. It draws Butch’s attention, the both of them heaving and retching, seeing each other’s faces for the first time in hours.</p><p>The letter remains intact for one fleeting moment, before turning into black spore dust right before their eyes. It pours from her hand like some cruel practical joke, before blowing away in the cold winter air. They exchange a look, that was felt between them heavily and it was a shared exchanged, which marked the night, when something terrible had happened. There was no one left to save, but themselves. It was time to get the hell out of St. Helens.</p><p>Well, them and Bill.</p><p>She goes to say something, but before she can, Butch is strapping on the Flamer like a man with a devil in him. He goes stomping into the house, with her calling after him. “Butch?” Then she hears it. The sound of a Flamer being emptied. She runs up the worn white steps and into the house, shouting his name. “Butch, what the hell are you doing?”</p><p>He’s in the room where the black vines have already withered away, lighting it up with zero hesitation. Fully crazed and unable to be convinced to leave the place, he’s screaming at her, insane with fear. “I’m burning it all! This whole crap-sack town! I’M GONNA BURN IT DOWN!” She looks at him and to the door, his expression utterly stark and unhinged. Shaking her head, she can’t say she doesn’t agree with him.</p><p>She’s turning on her heel, taking her backpack along the way. Complaining under her breath, and running out of the front door, she’s throwing their supplies back into Butch’s saddlebag. “Damn it, Butch…” The black smog is nowhere to be found, the air feeling clearer, in some unexplainable way. She needs to go check on Bill. “She’s pounding past Thula’s and Poe’s, passing up Mythos and no longer eager to ever enter it. </p><p>Finally, Deedman’s.</p><p>She’s bolting inside, not bothering to take pause, calling for the old man in the shadowy grocery store. “Bill! Bill you need to come with me! Bill?” She whirls around to look behind the register. Nothing. That’s when she hears it. The sound of a feral, pounding up the aisle.</p><p>She looks up in time to see who it is and her heart sinks. It’s Bill. Or rather, it was what was left of Bill, after becoming the feral ghoul, which was barreling for her. The old man’s eyes had exploded into patches of grey fungi, the overweight ghoul’s jowls full of ink black slobber. Like a FEV experiment gone wrong, the husk of Bill, was barreling right for her, the only recognizable feature about him, being his nametag.</p><p>She barely had time to grab her shotgun from off her back, but when Bill gets close enough, she doesn’t have to. Sorrow, which sounded vaguely sane, taints the ghoul’s final word, one hopeful question. “…Martha…?” Before the creature simply melts to the ground, exploding into a black spore cloud right at her feet. She stumbles back, barely having anytime to mourn, forced to get out of the cloud’s spread. This had been a terrible trip and she hadn’t been able to save anyone.</p><p>The blaze of 25 burning townhouses, has her looking up the street. She spots something disturbing as well as disheartening. She actually hears it, before she sees it. Ferals. Hundreds of ferals screaming and on fire.</p><p>She says it out loud, full of frustration. “Humble town of 25 my ass!”</p><p>She’s shaking her head in disbelief, as a moderate explosion, creates a mushroom cloud down the street where she’d come from. She ducks down on impulse, one name coming to mind and leaving her lips violently. “DAMN IT, BUTCH!” She’s hoofing it toward the explosion, taking aim at the burning horde, as they pour out of the burning townhouses like ants. The ferals converge on her in a massive sea of mindless hunger.</p><p>They’re all black and covered in white mushrooms, the fungi popping out of their skin in random variations. Thankfully, some of them die by the fire, before getting too close to her. That still leaves a massive horde ahead of her. They needed to get on their bike and go. She’s banking a decent amount of headshots, having to slow her run, searching for Butch amongst them.</p><p>She’s calling his name, her chest tightening with her usual worst fear, not including the fresh horrors they’d both just faced. “BUTCH!” He answers, much closer than she could have expected. “Over here, Angie!” She looks to her right and low and behold, there her partner sits, crouching in the red dumpster between Poe’s and Thula’s. Livid and locking eyes with him, she’s interrogating him. “What the hell did you do-“He hushes her, waving her toward his hiding place, his face black and covered in what she hopes is just soot. “-Hurry up and get over here!”</p><p>She’s jogging over, hoping that the ferals are too busy scrambling to notice. Finally on board with leaving this place in the dust, she’s got him by his jacket collar, shaking him angrily. “Where’s the bike! We have to get it and-“He lets out an agonized whine, soul shattered and oddly childlike, “My biiiiike! My damn bike! My baby’s dead!” It doesn’t make sense, has her looking over her shoulder frantically while she talks at him. “What do you mean dead-“The explosion, the mushroom cloud.</p><p>It’s all coming together right between her eyes like the worst migraine she’s ever had. “You blew up the bike- all our stuff was-“He cuts in, gripping the dumpster with both his hands, pathetic and weak, his blue eyes desolate. “-in my saddlebag.” There is a pregnant pause, which gets filled with her own little meltdown that consists of a swift, tinging kick to the dumpster and a watery yell. “How did this happen?!” He’s answering the semi rhetorical question at a mile a minute. “-The fuel tank caught fire. It lit up like a Christmas tree. Gas must have been leakin’ for-“She’s pulling him out of the dumpster and dragging him towards the back of the buildings, exasperation in her every word and all over her distraught face. “-I don’t care! We HAVE to get out of here!”</p><p>He’s scoffing at her, grabbing her hand and speeding up past her, fed up with her, stating the obvious. “That’s what I’ve been telling you for DAYS!” They’re crossing over, bolting past the storefronts, finding themselves behind the burning houses. A stray feral wanders between the homes, forcing them to hug the wall, the two hiding behind a literal burning building, whispering to each other frantically. She’s pulling up the forums on her Pipboy, not finding the signal and confiding in him about it. “We have to call for help. If we can get ahold of the Brotherhood, they can send a Bird over-“ The straggling feral comes snarling from around the corner.</p><p>Butch puts it down with a bullet in what used to be it’s ear, thankful for his silencer, reeling from all the excitement, staring up at the mountain, pitching in his own thoughts. “It’s the mountain. It’s blocking our network. I don’t know how but-“ The ferals are starting to pour into the alley behind them, forcing him to take her hand and run past a few homes to put distance between them. She’s saying it without thinking, letting him pulled her behind him. “…Bill’s dead.” Tacking it on as an afterthought, regretting it at the core of her being when she speaks about the unspeakable. “…what the hell was in that vault-“ He’s got her in a headlock, his hand covering her mouth, his back to the nearest wall, and her back to his chest.</p><p>He’s breathing hotly in her ear, like she’d blasphemed him with the memory. “-Never. Talk about it again.”</p><p>She can feel the fear in him and even after she’d brought it up, she swore it felt like the thing was still rising up from the ground they were standing on. His palm falls off her mouth and he’s eager to change the subject. “Captain Dusk and I have an understanding between us. Besides, she owes me for babysitting her niece.” Before she can comment, they’re being caged in by ferals on their left and right. It doesn’t seem like either of the hordes have spotted them between the sides of the houses they’re jammed between. She’s swallowing thickly, surrounded by death and fire, her tone calmer than she actually feels. “…do you have a Stealth Boy on you?”</p><p>His reply is low and quiet in her ear. “No.” Well, they were well and truly screwed.<em> Mraow! </em>The sound of their familiar Franken-feline is loud enough to draw their eyes to where it’s now perched on top of the roof in front of them. The house may be burning, but that cobbled ledge looks sturdy. He’s boosting her up onto his shoulders, sheer dumb luck keeping them both alive at this point.</p><p>The other building at his back is started to feel hot against it. The hoarse and broken screech of many ferals, tip him off to his impending demise. She’s reaching for his hand, the ghouls now racing for him on either side. Years of heavy lifting, give her the strength to pull him up, his boots scraping against the side of the house, as he scrambles to join her on the roof. The cat yowls at them again, before walking along the edge, as if showing them the way to go.</p><p>Butch takes one last look down, his own mortality weighing heavy on him. That could have been his gravesite. And what would his last words have been? An answer to a stupid question? She’s walking across the rooftop after the cat and he’s following close behind her.</p><p>Below them on the street the ghouls are slowly dying and spreading the flames to the storefronts. They aren’t dying fast enough to make them want to stay and wait it out. After jumping from burning rooftop to rooftop, they end up at the very first house on the street. St. Helen’s welcome sign in all its gloomy glory, is just yards away. They’d lost sight of the cat, but as they make their way down the side of the house, the thought gets put on the backburner.</p><p>The streets of St. Helen are burning as bright as the sun. There’s no cover between here and the road out of town. It’s a grave risk they have to take. The two move slow, begging to any higher power out there, than they don’t draw the hordes’ attention. They make it to the sign, just as their luck runs out.</p><p>The archway way begins to fall apart, like it’s operating on cursed ground, to simply spite them one final time. They outrun the falling wreckage, but by then it’s too late. The ferals have seen them and now it’s an endurance marathon to the tunnel. Butch and Angie don’t look back, but if they did, they knew they’d see a sea of rotten and crazed faces.</p><p>They see the mold along the road, withered and blowing away. Their lungs are burning and their legs are failing them. Shortly after they begin to lose the will to run, there it is. The tunnel that lead them here. The horde has been slowly falling behind, but in their physical exhaustion, they’re gaining ground inch by inch.</p><p>There’s no time to stop and think about breathing in whatever may still lurk inside that tunnel. The two dive headfirst into the pitch black, out of options all but for one. Angie’s pulling up VATS and Butch is lighting the last Molotov on his belt. She points and he lobs the thing at the lone street car, rusted and aged, at the right of the tunnel. It hits and once again, they are pushing forward by the impending reality of being buried alive.</p><p>Butch’s legs give out mid sprint, forcing him to the asphalt, scraping the skin off his hands and he’s barely able to keep his skull from cracking on the road. Angie calls out to him, skidding to a halt. “Butch! Oh my god-“ She’s out of breath and he is too. Everything burns. Everything hurts.</p><p>He rolls over and sees the full moon staring at them. Then there her face is above him, flushed and devoid of feeling. He sits up from his resting place and the sight before his eyes, is the loveliest thing he’s ever seen. The tunnel is full of rocks and nothing can come through ever again. Finally.</p><p>They’ve escaped the town beneath the mount.</p><hr/><p>By the time they reach the flatlands again, the sun is rising. They’re covered in blood, dust, and filth. They’re both on their last legs, trembling just by standing. The only downside of owning that bike was this. Being stranded far away from home without it.</p><p>They’ve both gone quiet. Tired. Neither of them has anything to give the other and it takes everything just to put one foot in front of the other. They reach where St. Helen’s shadow began and something forces Butch to look back. From here he can see the smoke rising.</p><p>St. Helen’s is still burning.</p><p>She shuffles up beside him and the two of them look on, in awe. It’s in that moment, after the physical abuse and the unthinkable horrors, which had devastated their perception on what was real and what was outside of their reality, that he made sense of something. It all made sense. Why had he been so afraid of the unknown? The words slip out, like he’s just too exhausted to keep them inside himself. “I love you…”</p><p>3 words, which they’ve never said to one another. It’s been implied, but he had been avoiding them. Running from them. Her head turns on her neck like it’s painful, the motion slow and dazed. He looks down at her battered face, unafraid. </p><p>This was a truth he understood and that he could wrap his head around, admitting it too easily in that moment. “…I’ve never said it before…” The fire on the mountain glows before them, the sun rising at their backs amidst a cloudy and smoke filled dawn, the long lonely road ahead all theirs to own. He feels a lump forming in his throat and when the tears start coming, he’s too tired to stop them, his voice cracking. “…didn’t know how to say it…” He shrugs, no smile, no real anything going on in his head, even as the words pour out of him. “…but I’m saying it now.” He feels her lacing her fingers inside his own and watches her blank expression, as her own tears start to stream down her face.</p><p>It’s not just the truth that hurts. Whatever they’d seen and felt under that town, had changed them. There was no talking about it. There was no solving it. They could only pray, that Vault 6 would stay shut forever.</p><p>He sobs and pulls her against him. They cried for a long time, shaking, just embracing there on the road. Everything he had worried about, felt so small. Who cares if she out grew him? Some things were bigger than him and unable for him to ever figure out.</p><p>It was the fear of the unknown, which had been out classed, by the unknowable. He hears her voice, raspy and lifeless, her whole form leaning heavily on him. “…I love you too...I need you so much…” At least he knew that much. Her hands are shaking and pulling his face to hers, kissing him to forget. She’d have given anything to forget what had been under St. Helens.</p><p>…whatever was STILL under St. Helens.</p><p>The End</p><p>...For Now</p><p>
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<a name="section0002"><h2>2. BONUS</h2></a>
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    <p>It’s a good mile or so before they’re able to gather themselves enough to start walking and find their network again. The first thing they do is send an audio message to Dusk for a heli-bird and the two of them refuse to even mention St. Helens. Not with the wounds so fresh in their minds. Butch has come to terms with what he said to her. He hadn’t wanted to allow himself to be happy.</p><p>They deface the crossroad’s sign of Providence and Benefit with fire, stopping there to rest only because their bodies force them to. He curses the mountain and mourns his bike. Mourns the sleepless nights ahead of him. She’s been quiet this whole time, content to hold his hand along the way. The first thing she says is, “I think I hate baseball…”</p><p>Like a knife, the memory of her disembodied voice claws down his spine. <em> “Come play with me, Butchie! I’ll let you slide right into home! Play with me!” </em></p><p>His body shudders of its own accord. He looks at her, dead serious, the two of them with heavy bags under their eyes. “Me too.” He’s taking a breath, closing his eyes, still seeing the void. He says it with conviction, now sitting in the dirt in his blood stained jeans. “Fuck baseball.” She gives him a knowing look and smiles.</p><p>It’s the first time she’s smiled since the tunnel collapsed. She eyes his knees, his jeans ripped and the threat of infection looming over him. She’s on her knees in front of him, gesturing to the gore, her voice hoarse. “...Want me to take a look at them.” He’s missing home and shaking his head, tone disheartened. “No point… nothing to clean ‘em up with.” She goes to say something, but gets interrupted, by an impossible sound.</p><p>
  <b> <em>Mraow!</em> </b>
</p><p>The two look back and there, trotting up the road and now sitting beside Butch, is Frankenstein the cat. Butch feels a laugh leave him, like he just can’t help it. “Holy crap. Where’d you come from?” The cat’s ribs are visible in a gory, open cadaver kind of way, but the way it purrs, helping itself to sit on Butch’s lap, is disturbingly endearing. Butch gingerly goes to scratch the good side of its boney head, avoiding the bits of skull poking through it’s inky black fur. Angie’s running a hand over the bumps of its spine, its existence and its living state, a near impossibility, muttering to herself over it. “…radiation can do some pretty odd things.”</p><p>The purring creature, offers them something to latch onto. He asks her something from deep within his heart. “Do you think...that you’re gonna outgrow me...some day?” She laughs, then catches the serious look on his face. They sit there, petting their new furry companion, as she thinks of an answer. She could make a joke or make light of it, but it’s just not in her after everything they went through.</p><p>She’s forced to be sincere. “Never... I’m not so mature myself you know...you did’t catch on?” He looks at her and the answer is more than enough to stroke his bleeding heart. Now, all that was left for them to do was wait for the Heli-bird. It took them awhile to get here by land, but flying was a whole new ballgame. The metaphor gets under his skin uncomfortably.</p><p>He just thought it would be an exciting idea.</p><p>He figures now’s as good a time as any to bring it up. “What’do you think about me building a Bird next time? Huh, Ange?” She gives him a sour look and grumbles at him tiredly, watching the cat curl up in his lap, seeming to favor him. “I think you should learn to stick to things that’ll blow up smaller…” His face falls and he shrugs at her, begrudgingly agreeing. “…yeah, good point.” He spent months on that bike. A bird would probably take him years.</p><p>They could only hope that their rescue wouldn’t take nearly as long.</p><p>Frankie’s kneading his thigh, before flopping down into a ball. Butch watches the cat intently, before holding up a hand towards his- “Yo, come here for a minute. Would ya, Girlfriend?” Angie’s brow raises at him quizzically, before obediently taking his hand. He tugs her against his side and wraps his arm around her shoulders. The three of them sit on the side of the road all huddled together and exhausted.</p><p>She’s got her hand over his heart and her voice is soft, once again full of warmth. “Never heard you call me that before...” He’s too spent to feel embarrassed, affirming the sentiment. “...Well, you’re my girl aren’t you?” As if responding to his voice automatically, she relaxes against him, bringing to mind lazy days with her on their living room couch. She doesn’t have to think too hard to agree with him, sighing as much to him. “Yeah...guess I am.” The cat stretches, it’s front paws now flopped over to her thigh, draped between them and holding them together in a way.</p><p>After a while, the two of them hear the sound of a Heli-bird, after having fallen asleep there. </p><p>They decided to keep the cat.</p>
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